SOURCE: Parker, Patricia. “Preposterous Reversals: Love's Labour's Lost.” Modern Language Quarterly 54, no. 4 (December 1993): 435-82.

[In the following essay, Parker highlights the various class and gender relationships in Love's Labour's Lost.]

At the beginning of Love's Labor's Lost, after the men of Navarre have sworn their “three years' fast … not to see a woman in that term” (1.1.24, 37), the Constable enters with a letter from the “magnificent Armado” accusing Costard of a crime that this so-called “shallow vassal” (1.1.253) proceeds to explain:

COST.
The matter is to me, sir, as concerning Jaquenetta: the manner of it is, I was taken with the manner.
BER.
In what manner?
COST.
In manner and form following, sir, all those three: I was seen with her in the manor-house, sitting with her upon the form, and taken following her into the park, which put together, is in manner and form following. Now, sir, for the manner—it is the manner of a man to speak to a woman; for the form—in some form.
BER.
For the following, sir? …
COST.
Such is the simplicity of man to hearken after the flesh.

(1.1.201-18)¹

Costard (described as an “unlettered small-knowing soul”) is arrested in this play of letters for a crime Armado the “book-man” proceeds to call an “obscene and most prepost'rous event” (242)—following a “female; or … a woman” (263-65), contrary to the all-male edict of Navarre. Preposterous—from posterus (“after” or “behind”) and prae (“in front” or “before”)—connotes here the reversal of post for pre, back for front, after for before, posterior for prior, end or sequel for beginning. As contemporary definitions make clear, preposterous is thus available not only for “backward” or “arsieversie” (John Barret) or for “last done which by rule [should] have ben first” (Richard Huloet), but for any inversion of an order understood as “proper” and “natural.”² The “prepost'rous event” that Armado here condemns is “preposterous” not only because it involves contravening the edict of the King but because its “manner and form following” involves a man following a woman—“a child of our grandmother Eve” (264)—a reversal of the priority and proper ordering of the genders in Genesis, where Eve (created after Adam, as her “head”) is meant subordinately to “follow” him.³

Costard himself, the lowly or “shallow vassal,” is the counterpart in the order of class or social hierarchy to Jaquenetta, the “weaker vessel” (272) in the order of gender, the “low matter” (192) to which the high “style” (199) of Armado's letter stoops. And the lines that lead to Armado's “obscene and most prepost'rous event” are preoccupied with the distance between “high” and “low,” “high words” (193) and low things. Armado's inflated rhetoric (with its gap between “low matter” and “high” style) introduces into the play the problem of the separation rather than the fit between verba and res, words and things, a separation which as the play proceeds will also rebound upon the pretensions of the aristocratic men, who repeatedly sever words from things, from deeds, or from more material substance. “Matter,” here, in the sense of the thing concerned—as distinguished from the style or “manner”—is described in this scene in the parodied language of a formal legal proceeding: “as concerning [Latin in re] Jaquenetta,” the particular female “matter” or “thing” (res) in question here. But the letter's explicitly elevated style (“be it as the style shall give us cause to climb in the merriness”)—with its sexual double entendres on “merriness” and on the swelling of Armado's “style” (as Shakespeare's Bottom puts it) to a “point”—also recalls the proverbial association of such a “low matter” or res with “women's matters” (Julius Caesar 1.1.22) or “country matters” (Hamlet 3.2.116), the “matter” that Iago in Othello explicitly sexualizes as a female res or “thing” (3.3.301-2). The link is made even more explicit when Armado proceeds to stoop to the “base matter” of this same Jaquenetta's “shoe,” a term linked in Two Gentlemen of Verona to the punning “shoe” with a “hole in it” that designates the sexual “shoe” or “show” of women as the “worser sole” (2.3.14-18). If Costard is right that this particular “matter is to me,” in other words, it is not for long. For Jaquenetta—the play's first representative of what Berowne will later call the “sign of she” (5.2.469)—will soon be taken up with the particular “manner” or “style” of the same inflated or “magnificent” Armado, who quickly turns from the high dudgeon of accusatory self-righteousness to pursue her lowly res as well.

From as early as this opening scene of Love's Labor's Lost—a play linked routinely with the highbrow or high as opposed to the bodily or low—the language of the “high” (here that of judicial proceeding and its sequiturs of “following”) is contaminated or brought low by the “low matter” of the bodily and sexual.⁴ The entire scene of Armado's rhetorically inflated letter is a parody of the “high words” and elaborate formalities of judicial arrest, formalities meant to separate Armado as a lettered “book-man” from the “barbarous” (5.1.82). The letter the King proceeds to read to both onstage and offstage audiences unfolds through the “time When” and “ground Which” of formal legal indictment, part of the new apparatus of a literacy linked with control and governance, reflected in contemporary treatises for justices of the peace and other officers of the Crown and law.⁵ But the “high” formalities are here themselves deformed, not just in Armado's comic misconstruings but by the lowly “vassal” Costard, whose attempts to “vary the letter,” as it was called (in lines that parody the textbook examples of such turning or varying), are motivated by a much more immediate and practical need to evade the “sentence” of the law (1.1.289-300).⁶ The scene joins the deformation of the newly fashionable “lettered” formalities elsewhere in Shakespeare—in contexts where “Clowns” ostensibly too untutored to master the unfamiliar forms call attention to their structures (and uses) in the very act of deforming them. In Love's Labor's Lost, such deformations of grammar, logic, and what “follows” from them disorder what in A Midsummer Night's Dream is called the ordered “chain” of discourse (5.1.122-26), in a play in which unlettered “rude mechanicals” reveal both the mechanics of its construction and its links with “governance” of all kinds. The arrest of the base “vassal” Costard initiates what becomes in this earlier comedy an insistent foregrounding not only of the disordering “preposterous,” as we shall see, but of the discipline and functions of literacy itself, part of the activity of ordering and division on which what Norbert Elias calls the “civilizing process” depends, induction into a decorum (and decorousness) meant to distinguish “high” from (social and bodily) “low.”⁷

The inflated Armado's comic proceeding through the “who,” “what,” “when,” and “how” of such “high words” provides an opportunity for the aristocratic men to mock him in this opening scene: but his manner is almost exactly echoed in the higher-born Boyet's rhetorically swollen address to the Princess in act 2 (1.1-8). The elaborate or “high” formalities of logical division—meant to enable precisely the activity of separating or distinguishing—are pilloried by the “base” (in rank) and “junior” (in age) servant Moth's reductio ad absurdum in act 2, as he separates “sadness” and “melancholy” (1.2.7-8) and manages to reduce the “three years” of Navarre's forbidding edict into nothing more troubling than an “hour” (1.2.37), when his master Armado seeks to evade the restrictions of that edict without being technically forsworn.⁸ If from the perspective of the higher social orders in this play, the appropriate response to Costard's (or Armado's) imperfect mastery of “manner and form” is mockery and ridicule, from another perspective these deformations, turnings, and varyings reflect on far more than the lower orders in the play: the “high” is brought “low” not only by the iterations of parodic mimickry but through exposures (such as the cheeky servant Moth's) of how open to manipulation are the forms themselves (how “preposterously” led by bodily desire, rather than, more loftily, the other way around), when such turning or varying becomes a means through which the pretensions of the aristocrats are themselves deflated.

Let us return, then, from this parody of juridico-discursive form in act 1 to the “obscene and most preposterous event” that is its comic object. The “preposterous” crime for which Costard is imprisoned—having “sorted and consorted,” with “a female; or for thy more sweet understanding, a woman” (1.1.264-65)—is not only “preposterous” in the sense of reversing the proper order of the genders (what should come after for what should come before) but pronounced contrary to the King's “proclaimed edict and continent canon” (1.1.259-60), a term generally glossed as a canon or law enforcing restraint.⁹ The edict of the King that binds the little Platonic “academe” (1.1.13) of men is thus associated with “continence” in contrast to the incontinence that would result from consorting with women. As an edict meant to preserve an all-male enclosure and its inviolate integrity, it is therefore threatened by the incontinence or breaching associated with the (moral as well as bodily) “fault” of women, not only the “weaker vessel” (as Jaquenetta is called in 1.1.272) but traditionally an incontinent or “leaky” one, whose bodily openness, “fault” or “crack” is contrasted to male self-enclosure and bodily integritas.¹⁰ The King himself echoes the danger of such “breaching” in his limitation on how far his liberality (2.1.167) will go in accommodating the new female incursion that threatens the undoing of the aristocratic men, when the Princess of France and her retinue arrive at the boundaries of his all-male retreat:

KING.
… Mean time receive such welcome at my hand
As honor (without breach of honor) may
Make tender to thy true worthiness. …

(2.1.168-70)

A breaching of the original “continent canon” and oath, however, is precisely what ensues, as each of the King's company follows in turn the model of Costard's defection.

That Jaquenetta is associated with Eve in the play's initial scene of “preposterous” reversal already links this “weaker vessel” with the “fault” of the original generic “female; or … woman” (1.1.264-65). Fittingly, then, for his Adamic role and the play's iteration of the original Edenic incontinence, Costard's name means both “apple” and slang for “head”; and this vassal's “hearkening after the flesh” (218), in the lines on “manner and form following,” directly echoes Adam's “flesh of my flesh” from the Genesis account of female and male, as well as the reversal in which this first-created “head” hearkened after that “flesh” or original “sign of she” (5.2.469). The phrase attached to Jaquenetta—the “weaker vessel” here—links her explicitly with the tradition of woman as secondary and subordinate, a sequel whose subordination follows from her creation after Adam as both prior and head. And the “preposterous event” that occasions Costard's imprisonment also summons recollection of the “fault” that led to the original preposterous reversal of the genders, and with it the breaching of an Edenic enclosure and continence.

Eve follows Adam in the order of Genesis and should follow him as his sequel and subordinate. But Eve is also the leader in the fall of man: the very texts that gloss her secondary position in creation as authorizing the subordination of women are at pains to point out that this sign of she, though created last, was first to sin.¹¹ The “obscene and most preposterous event” that begins the series of defections with a “man” (1.1.217) later called a “turf of earth” (4.2.88) and here caught following “a child of our grandmother Eve” (264) thus becomes, within this early Shakespearean comedy, a recall of the original lapse or “fault” that breached the paradisal containment (another sense of “continent”) of another “park”—one that long-standing misogynist tradition held would still be intact but for the creation of that “she.” Eve is created after Adam, and so follows him; but she is the leader in an act of sin in which Adam in turn—or we might say by “turning” or varying—becomes the first follower of “our grandmother Eve,” the “female; or … woman” without whose “fault” this “park” would still be unbreached.

The “preposterous event” of Costard's following Jaquenetta is, however, only the beginning of a series of such “preposterous” inversions in this play—of male and female, high and low, prior and posterior, and their bodily counterparts. Immediately following Costard's defection as the lowly “head” or first within this series comes the second, when Armado seeks “authorities” for his falling for this same “base wench” (1.2.59), in the exalted biblical and classical exempla of antiquity: Hercules overcome by Omphale, Sampson by Delilah, and Solomon by the heathen women (1.2.65-76, 173-81). For all of Armado's (or the aristocratic men's subsequent) attempts to find some “mighty president” (1.2.16) or precedent (Quarto “presedent”) for their own defections, it is the “base” Costard who in this series comes first, providing the “president” or precedent for the plot that ensues. In what thus represents an inversion of class as well as gender, the vassal Costard, in a scene recalling Adam as both “head” and man of “earth,” becomes in retrospect a “president” set by the lowliest of the men—the “base” (rather than the exalted or “mighty”) head from which all else follows in the play as what Moth will call a “sequel” (3.1.134). The fact, for example, that Berowne's letter to Rosaline (condemning evidence of his defection) gets crossed with Armado's to the lowly Jaquenetta implicates both “high” and “low” registers in this play in the original Adamic incontinence: not only parleying or speaking with but following a woman. It therefore undoes the play's elaborately constructed distinctions between “high” and “low,” as both are brought low by the “weaker vessel” who is herself supposed to be mere second, subordinate or sequel.

As the second in the sequels to Costard's defection, the “magnificent” Armado—already the play's avatar of the “high” style of rhetoric applied to “lowly matters” of all kinds—turns not only to this same “base wench” but to adoration of her “foot” and “shoe” (1.2.168), a stooping that involves reversal both of the order of gender and of vertical hierarchy or social distinction. The rhetorical foot fetish involved in his subsequent abasement to her “foot” (“profane my lips on thy foot” [4.1.85])—in lines that evoke the bawdy double entendres on “foot” later exploited in Henry V (3.4.51-54)—joins his abasement to her “shoe,” in lines that recall the familiar linking of this female “low matter” with the “shoe” with the “hole” in it, woman as Eve-descended “weaker vessel” and “worser sole”: “I do affect the very ground (which is base) where her shoe (which is baser) guided by her foot (which is basest) doth tread” (1.2.167-69).

Armado's “falling” for Jaquenetta yields another reminder of the “fault” of “our grandmother Eve” when the Iberian Don proclaims his “most immaculate” love for this “base wench.” His “My love is most immaculate white and red” (1.2.90) invokes the colors of love poetry from the idealized Song of Songs. But Moth's deflating rejoinder—“Most maculate thoughts, master, are mask'd under such colors” (1.2.91-92)—provides a reminder, instead, of the “maculate” or impure, the adulterating or duplicitous “colors” of cosmetic as well as rhetoric. And the sense of duplicity is underlined in the “rhyme” Moth recites, which treats repeatedly of a woman's “faults” (1.2.100-102), in a pun that links the impure or “false” with Eve's breach and women's (moral and sexual) “faults.” Such wordplay, accumulating as the play proceeds, adds to its developing lexicon of associations for the generic “sign of she”: original “fault” or crack in a “continent” enclosure; impurity, maculation or cosmetic coloring; “preposterous” subversion of the proper order of “head” and “foot.” Armado adds to this gathering series when he stoops to the same “weaker vessel” Costard had pursued, referring to his varying from the continent “edict” of Navarre as a “digression” (1.2.115-19) and linking his turning to this “base wench” with translation or linguistic “turning,” from Latin, the exalted sermo patrius, to the “base and obscure vulgar” (4.1.68-69) or vernacular “mother” tongue, in the letter he sends to proclaim his devotion to her “lowliness” (4.1.80).

Armado's letter to Jaquenetta calls hyperbolic attention to the betrayal of his class (or class aspirations) such a turning involves, by invoking the emblem of “King Cophetua” (4.1.65), who stooped to love of a “Beggar Maid.” At the same time, the language of Petrarchan servitude and self-abasement on which he calls appears to reverse the class relation into a gendered one, in which he appears to wait on her as her servant in love, in ways the saucy mockery of this “country girl” (1.2.117) perpetually deflates. Armado's letter to Jaquenetta speaks in the polarized language of high and low, but also in this language of idealized self-abasement, at the same time as it exposes the threatening underside of such a stooping, the possibility that a beggar's love, if not freely granted, might be “enforced”: “I am the king, for so stands the comparison; thou the beggar, for so witnesseth thy lowliness. Shall I command thy love? I may. Shall I enforce thy love? I could. Shall I entreat thy love? I will. What shall thou exchange for rags? robes; for tittles? titles; for thyself? me. Thus expecting thy reply, I profane my lips on thy foot, my eyes on thy picture, and my heart on thy every part” (4.1.78-86). For the moment, however, it confuses the roles of subject and object, conqueror and conquered, in its comically elaborate gloss on Caesar's Veni, vidi, vici, which when translated into the vulgar or “mother” tongue (appropriate translational counterpart to the “base wench” who has so transported him) comes to rest in a catastrophic “nuptial” (“The catastrophe is a nuptial”)—one in which it is not clear who is marrying whom (“on whose side? the king's; no, on both in one, or one in both” [4.1.78]).

Both “preposterous” and “in manner and form following” in the scene of Costard's defection in act 1 have subsequent resonances throughout Love's Labor's Lost, in its relentless emphasis on the inversion of order and sequence, on the reversal of beginning and end, front and back, prior and “posterior.” References to “following” and to sequence—as well as to the “preposterous” in the vernacular sense of “arsy-versy”—are literally everywhere in this early Shakespearean comedy, though commentaries that portray it as bookishly highbrow, stilted, or academic have discouraged noticing (or commenting on) particularly the manifold bodily versions of the “arsy-versy” within it.

There is, to begin with, a persistent harping on the relation of what comes before and what should follow or come behind. Moth answers Armado's command to “follow” him (3.1.133) with a flippant “Like the sequel, I” (3.1.133-34), in a scene literally packed with wordplay on what should come first and what at an end. Holofernes describes Berowne's letter to Rosaline as being to a “sequent [or follower] of the stranger queen's” (4.2.138-39). And the play repeatedly parodies the new humanist disciplines of ordered sequence and what should “follow” what—from Costard's “in manner and form following” to the changes rung on how “vidi” follows “veni,” while “vincit” follows both (4.1.64-80). Early in the play, for example, we encounter the exchange between Dumaine and Berowne on what might “follow” fittingly in the sequiturs of “reason”:

LONG.
He weeds the corn and still lets go the weeding.
BER.
The spring is near when green geese are a-breeding.
DUM.
How follows that?
BER.
                                                            Fit in his place and time.
DUM.
In reason nothing.
BER.
                                                            Something then in rhyme.

(1.1.96-99)

The juxtaposition here—of “reason” and of “rhyme”—returns elsewhere in the play, with implications for women's “faults,” as we shall see. But even before Costard's “manner and form following” in this same act, this early exchange between the two aristocratic men introduces the problem of “what follows” and by what form of “fitting.”

This harping on “following” continues in this comedy's bookish evocations of humanist imitatio, rendered in English precisely as “following”—what Berowne derides as mere imitation or “base authority from others' books” (1.1.86-87). As the play proceeds, however, the highbrow notions of exempla and imitatio soon become the less exalted principle of sheeplike following enunciated by the perjured Dumaine (“Ill, to example ill, / Would from my forehead wipe a perjur'd note: / For none offend where all alike do dote” [4.3.122-24]). And the humanist discipline of exemplary “following” invoked in Armado's search for “some mighty president” (1.2.116-17) among “great men” becomes, once the King's men are “all forsworn” (4.3.278), their desperate search for some “authority” (283) for their own diversion or turning to the “opposed end” of their original “intents” (5.2.758), their following of another “base authority” as they post first in one direction and then in its reverse. “Following” of this sort is suggested by the well-worn joke on “ship” and “sheep” (“Two hot sheeps … wherefore not ships?” [2.1.218]), one so familiar by the time we reach the “sweet fellowship in shame” (4.3.48) of the perjured men that the ear may hear in this new male “fellowship” the “fellow-sheep” of their own sheeplike following or pursuit.¹²

The reversal involved in the play's “obscene and most preposterous event”—Costard's turning and following of a woman and the aristocratic men's following his base “president” in turn—is reflected not only in the series of “arsy-versy” gender and class reversals this volte-face implies but by the dizzying verbal reversals and rhetorical turns for which the play is notorious—in lines such as Berowne's “They have pitch'd a toil; I am toiling in a pitch” (4.3.2-3), Armado's “I love not to be cross'd” with Moth's “mere contrary, crosses love not him” (1.2.32-34), or the exchange in act 5 between Berowne and Rosalind (Ber. Our states are forfeit, seek not to undo us. / Ros. It is not so, for how can this be true, / That you stand forfeit, being those that sue? [5.2.425-27]).¹³ What I want to suggest, however, from the perspective of the verbal, bodily, and structural inversions set in motion by this comedy's initial “preposterous event,” is that its notorious verbal reversals and rhetorical turns—far from being gratuitous marks of the “merely” verbal—are inseparable from the “preposterous” reversals of gender, class, and other forms of ordering and distinguishing it proceeds to stage, as well as from the bodily and even scatalogical dimension that makes this early (and by reputation “highbrow”) Shakespearean comedy into something closer to what Stephen Booth has called “a sustained, two-hour pun on end.”¹⁴

At the level of the plot, the “preposterous event” of Costard's following of Jaquenetta is iterated in the series of preposterous events that follow from it, as each of the men performs his own turnabout or volte-face to what Berowne terms the “opposed end” of their original “intents.” As if to call attention to the reversal of “high” and “low” these about-turns effect, Berowne invokes a whole series of parallels in his chastising of his fellows in act 4:

To see a king transformed to a gnat!
To see great Hercules whipping a gig,
And profound Salomon to tune a jig,
And Nestor play at push-pin with the boys,
And critic Timon laugh at idle toys!

(4.3.164-68)

This sense of preposterous reversal runs through a whole series of exchanges—of old and young, high and low, male and female in the play: from the “child” or “tender juvenal” Moth's instructing his “old man” or “tough senior” (1.2.11-12, 5.1.62) to the “boy” Cupid's commanding men (1.2.180-81); from the Princess's presuming to teach the King, her social and gender superior (2.1.108) or Jaquenetta's saucier mockery of the “magnificent” Armado (1.2.133-45) to the Pageant of Worthies in which lower-caste players instruct their social betters, though the lessons appear lost on the aristocratic men.

Beyond the verbal sparring and antithetical repartee that fills Love's Labor's Lost, a sense of “preposterous” reversal informs both what might otherwise seem simply gratuitous homophonic play and the elaborate structuring of entire scenes. The reversal of back for front, end for beginning, pervades—to take one signal example—the dizzying scene of wordplay and stage play in act 3 on “l'envoy” and “salve” that involves a “costard” broken in a “shin” (3.1.70). The exchange begins as the imprisoned Costard is summoned to be an “embassador” for Armado to Jaquenetta (Arm. Fetch hither the swain, he must carry me a letter. / Moth. A message well sympathiz'd—a horse to be embassador for an ass [3.1.49-52]). As Moth enters with the “Clown” Costard, however, he announces this delaying “wonder” or “riddle”:

MOTH.
A wonder, master! Here's a costard broken in a shin.
ARM.
Some enigma, some riddle—come, thy l'envoy—begin.
COST.
No egma, no riddle, no l'envoy, no salve in the mail, sir. O sir, plantan, a plain plantan; no l'envoy, no l'envoy, no salve, sir, but a plantan!

(3.1.69-74)

The exchange that prefaces Costard's enfranchisement as an “embassador” begins, then, with a “riddle” or “enigma”—how a “costard” (“apple” or “head”) could be broken in a “shin.” But the lowly Costard's response quickly identifies this enigma to be solved with an “egma” or enema, and rejects “l'envoy” and “salve” in favor of the homelier remedy of a “plain plantan.” What then follows is extended debate on the reversing of “l'envoy” and “salve” (Arm. Doth the inconsiderate take salve for l'envoy, and the word “l'envoy” for a salve? / Moth. Do the wise think them other? is not l'envoy a salve? [77-80]), an exchange in which “l'envoy”—defined as an afterword or postscript (“an epilogue or discourse to make plain / Some obscure precedence that hath tofore been sain” [81-82]) and as something that should “follow” or come at an end (“Now will I begin your moral, and do you follow with my l'envoy” [3.1.94])—is confused with the “salve” (or Latin “salve”) that comes at a beginning.¹⁵

As the pyrotechnical wordplay proceeds, in increasingly dizzying reversals (including of speaking positions, exchanged midway), “l'envoy” is, however, also described as “ending in” the “goose,” an overdetermined bit of vernacular that suggests both a potential rude gesture and the slang for “prostitute” or venereal disease, introducing into what had seemed simply academic debate about beginnings and ends an association with “salves” and ends in a more bodily sense. The entire exchange, once again, negotiates the distance between “high” and “low”—the social-climbing Armado introducing the notion of the formal epilogue or “l'envoy” (associated in the period with the pretensions of Gabriel Harvey) and the “vassal” Costard confusing it with a different kind of end, as well as rejecting what he takes to be high-class remedies with foreign-sounding names for the local remedy of the “plain plantan,” homelier cure for ailments of both “head” and “shin.”¹⁶ The “enigma/egma” of a “costard broken in a shin” depends on the “costard” that is both “apple” and slang for “head”—producing a riddle involving the body's “opposed ends”—while “broken in a shin,” apart from the physical breaking of shins common in an age when the “threshold” had to be high in order to “hold” the “thresh” (“I, Costard, running out that was safely within, / Fell over the threshold, and broke my shin” [3.1.116-17]), also summons the contemporary sense of “sexual disappointment” (Costard is, after all, replaced as a suitor by the socially higher Armado here) and the slang for raising money, a resonance not inappropriate for a scene in which Costard is not only going to be “enfranchised” but will receive monetary “remuneration” (136) for his services.¹⁷

In this exchange on “l'envoy” and “salve,” “costard” and “shin,” then, the inflated or highbrow term “l'envoy” (as in Harvey's formal afterword, epilogue, send-off, or farewell) gets associated with the “low matter” of the bodily. (We might also note here that in the most famous of satires on the pretensions of Harvey's “Post-scripts” and “Lenvoyes,” the “l'envoy” understood as “end” is already subject to scatalogical links with the body's end, in ways resonant for the “enigma/egma” of this scene.)¹⁸ In ways that recall the original “obscene and most preposterous event” of Costard's following a woman, the linking of “envoy” and “goose” in the sense of loose or base wench finally prompts this same Costard's mistaking of Armado's announcement that he will “enfranchise” him for his intention to marry him off to “one Frances,” stock name for a loose, “frank” or “liberal” woman (“I smell some l'envoy, some goose, in this” [3.1.121-22]). “L'envoy,” then, described as “ending in the goose” (99)—or “fat l'envoy” linked to “fat goose” (103)—already contaminate this more academic and textual postscript or end with more bodily and bawdy suggestions, whether or not there is a hint of “buttocks” in “l'envoy,” as the evidence marshalled by Stephen Booth suggests.¹⁹

Costard's confusion of an “enigma” to be solved with an “egma” as another kind of loosing, at the beginning of this exchange, is picked up in its final lines, as Costard is to be “enfranchised” or let loose in order to become Armado's envoy or messenger (or as Moth puts it, “embassador for an ass” [3.1.52]):

ARM.
Sirrah Costard, I will enfranchise thee.
COST.
O, marry me to one Frances. I smell some l'envoy, some goose, in this.
ARM.
By my sweet soul, I mean setting thee at liberty, enfreedoming thy person: thou were immured, restrained, captivated, bound.
COST.
True, true, and now you will be my purgation and let me loose.

(3.1.120-27)

As editors of the play concur, the “purgation” or letting “loose” of something described here as “immured, restrained, captivated, bound” introduces an unmistakable bodily reference into the “purgation” that entails the freeing of this “embassador,” one that follows from the sliding of “enigma” into “egma” at its beginning.²⁰

This apparently utterly gratuitous scene of wordplay in act 3 depends, then, first on the reversal of what comes after for what should come before, a “l'envoy” that should come last, as “an epilogue or discourse, to make plain / Some obscure precedence that hath tofore [i.e., ‘before’] been sain” (3.1.81), with a “salve” or greeting that should come at the beginning, one, however, that also suggests a “salvo” or discharge and hence yet more scatalogical connections with an “end.”²¹ And at the end of this exchange on before and after, beginnings and ends, a loosing or opening up of something described as “immured, restrained, captivated, bound” (3.1.125) forges links both with the immured enclosure of the “continent edict” Armado is about to breach and with the “egma” that adds the purgative problem of an “end” to be loosed to the more high-flown riddle or “enigma” to be solved. The afterword that then accompanies the discharge of Costard as an envoy or “embassador” is Moth's response to this same master, that he will “follow” like the “sequel” (134).

“Envoy”—postscript or afterword—is linked here, then, with “embassador” (52), the messenger Armado is about to make of Costard by enfranchising him. But the entire scene of wordplay that begins with the enigma of a “costard” broken in a “shin” also turns out by its end to hint at a “purgation,” “egma” or another kind of envoi, sending forth or enfranchising in a different sense. The sense in “enfranchising” of letting loose what was “immured” (124) or letting “out” what was held “within” (116) enables the bodily, scatalogical overtones at the end of this exchange. And, since “l'envoy” also means dramatic end or catastrophe,²² this scene in the midst of Love's Labor's Lost not only looks behind, to the original “continent” enclosure or immurement of the all-male “academe” Armado is about to breach, but forward to the end of the play itself, which involves, as we shall see, not only envoys and sequels but another kind of breaching.²³

Reversal of sequence and direction in this play occurs not only in the antithetical turns of rhetorically patterned lines or the dizzying wordplay of this exchange on “l'envoy” but in the elaborately patterned Eavesdropping Scene in act 4 (3), where each of the aristocratic men appears, hides, and witnesses each subsequent new confession, before the scene literally turns upon itself, unwinding in reverse, as the defectors are brought out of hiding in exactly the opposite sequence and Berowne, the first to appear onstage, becomes the last to be exposed.²⁴ In this elaborate patterning, first Berowne, then the King, then Longaville, and finally Dumaine enters and confesses his perjury; then, in reverse order, Longaville steps forward to expose Dumaine, the King to expose Longaville, and Berowne to expose the King, before Berowne himself—the first to stray though last to be discovered—is overtaken by the “letter” or “post” which returns to its sender and accuses him in turn. The dramatic patterning of this Eavesdropping or pivotal “recognition” scene—winding up in one direction and unwinding in reverse—involves both a structural peripeteia and an ironic fulfillment of Berowne's own pronouncement in act 1, in one of the play's multiple variations on the last that shall be first. For the same Berowne who says there “I am the last that will last keep his oath” (1.1.160) becomes the first here to view (from an “over-view” [4.3.173]) the entire sequence of perjuries confessed, before he too is exposed at its final moment. It is perhaps fitting, then, that it is Berowne as well who utters another such paradoxical (but, for the perjured, face-saving) formula in this scene: “Let us once lose our oath to find ourselves, / Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths” (4.3.358-59).

The exchange on “envoy” and “salve” involving lower-caste characters in act 3 and the Eavesdropping Scene in act 4 that exposes those higher up are explicitly linked when at the end of the latter Berowne is asked to find some “salve for perjury” (Long. O, some authority how to proceed; / Some tricks, some quillets, how to cheat the devil. / Dum. Some salve for perjury [4.3.283-85]). In the lengthy justification his famous exonerating speech constructs for the aristocrats' complete turnabout or volte-face—their posting to the “opposed end” of their original “intents” (5.2.758)—what might from one perspective appear an offense is cleverly converted or turned into its opposite, and forswearing or perjury reversed into a new kind of fidelity (4.3.287-362). When all of the King's men have (like the lowly Costard) finally been exposed, Berowne responds to their need for this saving “salve” (4.3.285) by the speech in which he sets out to prove that what they “first did swear unto” (287) should now be put behind, as they embrace the new “authority” and “books” of “women's eyes” (347). And this rhetorical about-face begets a whole series of reversals:

For wisdom's sake, a word that all men love,
Or for love's sake, a word that loves all men,
Or for men's sake, the authors of these women,
Or for women's sake, by whom we men are men,
Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves,
Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths.

(4.3.354-59)

Berowne's rhetorical “turn” or tour de force is the pivot on which the play itself turns—away from the initial “continent canon” and oath to a new vow to “woo these girls of France” (368). And the echoes of the reversals and “salve” of the “envoy” scene are strengthened here by Berowne's “Light wenches may prove plagues to men forsworn” (4.3.382), when what is offered as a “salve for perjury” prompts remembrance of the “plagues” proverbially associated both with incontinence and with “girls of France,” the danger that any who follow them may need another kind of “salve.”²⁵

Play on such “preposterous” reversal—of “opposed end” to initial aim, of back to front, after for before, end for beginning—is so insistent in this play as often to appear to be repeated purely for this emphasis. In act 3, for example, just after the wordplay on “l'envoy,” there is the curious exchange in which Costard promises to appear “tomorrow morning” to receive instructions for a task he is to perform “this afternoon,” swearing that he will know what to do only after he has done it, in opposition to Berowne's insistence that he must know before or “first” (Cost. When would you have it done, sir? / Ber. O, this afternoon. / Cost. Well, I will do it, sir; fare you well. / Ber. O, thou knowest not what it is. / Cost. I shall know, sir, when I have done it. / Ber. Why, villain, thou must know first. / Cost. I will come to your worship to-morrow morning. / Ber. It must be done this afternoon … [3.1.154-61]). Here again, the play on what comes before and what after, and their reversal, is insisted on at what might seem the level of purely gratuitous verbal exchange.

We need, however, to attend to the hierarchical position of the interlocutors here; for the implications of this exchange are not simply verbal but part of the relation in the play of “high” and “low.” Berowne's commissioning of Costard is a second attempt (after Armado's) to enlist him as an envoy, “embassador” (3.1.52), instrument or messenger. But in the “unletter'd” Costard's role as a carrier of letters for both of his social superiors—Armado and Berowne—each is subverted as the letters are misdirected and crossed, either deliberately (by a wily as well as “base” instrument) or as a result of his illiteracy. When Costard first puzzles over the meaning of “remuneration” (the term Armado employs when he commissions him) and learns that it is less than the “guerdon” or “gardon” (3.1.169-73) Berowne can pay for a similar service, what he engages in is not abstract speculation over the relation of verba and res but a question of reference with more material import and much more practical at stake (Ber. … There's thy guerdon; go. / Cost. Gardon, O sweet gardon! better than remuneration, eleven-pence-farthing better [3.1.169-71]).²⁶ The letter from Berowne to the “snow-white hand of the most beauteous Lady Rosaline” (4.2.132-33)—the one that Costard delivers first (4.1.41-59)—is in fact exchanged or “mistook” (4.1.57), passing through the baser hand of Jaquenetta before it returns to its sender, embarrassingly, at the end of the Eavesdropping Scene (4.3.191). The emphasis in such crossing is not just on the “great feast of languages” (5.1.36) or on antithetical turns or verbal reversals for their own sake, but also on social relations of precedence and priority, in a crossing in which the subordination of “low” to the socially higher or “high” that seeks to “employ” it (3.1.151) as messenger or envoy is subverted by a “misprision” in which the letters are “mistaken” (4.1.106) in every punning sense.

Similarly, what may appear merely gratuitous verbal reversals or rhetorical turns in this play are often inseparable from its reversals of gender. Love's Labor's Lost involves not only the overturning of comic conventions in its unconventional end—in which “Jack” hath not “Gill” and the women impose a delay “too long for a play” (5.2.875-78)—but the repeated reversal of contemporary stereotypes of female and male. The conventional Petrarchan topos governing, for example, The Rape of Lucrece—the male erotic siege of a female enclosure—is in this play explicitly reversed, as besieging “ladies” are placed outside the enclosure of an all-male “park.” In a reverse, therefore, of the usual gender positions, the women of the play occupy the place and imagery of the aggressive male lover and the Princess of France and her attending Ladies present themselves as “humble-visag'd suitors” outside the King's “forbidden gates” (2.1.26, 34).²⁷ Though in ways not as explicitly irreverent as the responses of Jaquenetta to her male superiors and social betters, the Princess and her entourage also refuse to be subordinate or obsequious: if the Princess when addressing the King says initially “pardon me, I am too sudden bold; / To teach a teacher ill beseemeth me” (2.1.107-8), teaching the aristocratic men is what she and the other Ladies proceed to do. The play also reiterates the familiar misogynist topos of women's supposedly unstoppable tongues: any woman caught within the enclosure of the park is to suffer the punishment of Philomela, her tongue cut out. But as the plot unfolds, it is the aristocratic men (or Armado, their ape) who most want “chat” (5.2.228), who are wordy, loquacious, or too copious of tongue. And although the penalty for the woman who intrudes into this all-male retreat is to have her tongue excised (1.1.124), the actual women in this play have tongues more cutting than they are cut, described as like “the razor's edge” (“The tongues of mocking wenches are as keen / As is the razor's edge invisible” [5.2.256-57]).

The play's notoriously pointed speech is suggestively allied with its phallic counterpart; but in the exchanges between the Princess's retinue and the followers of the King, it is the women who are the possessors of the “pricks” and “points.” When Berowne, for example, says to Rosaline, “Will you prick't (prick-it) with your eye?” she responds, “No point, with my knife” (2.1.189-90), playing on the double sense of “eye” as female genitalia (and hence her supposed lack of “point”) but nevertheless offering to “prick it.” This same Rosaline, launching arrows at a target, indulges in bawdy dialogue with Boyet in which, as Katherine Maus points out, she identifies herself as the shooter/suitor who “hits” her “mark” (female “matter” or matrix) with a “prick.”²⁸ In Holofernes's description of the hunt, it is the Princess who is described as having “pierc'd and prick'd a pretty pleasing pricket” (4.2.56). And when Berowne at last presents himself to Rosaline as a passive target and exclaims

Here stand I, lady, dart thy skill at me,
Bruise me with scorn, confound me with a flout,
Thrust thy sharp wit quite through my ignorance,
Cut me to pieces with thy keen conceit

(5.2.396-99)

the raped and mutilated Philomela envisaged in the men's initial pact and oath is replaced by something more suggestive of a passive male victim—an Orpheus or an Actaeon, cut down by Bacchantes or the instruments of the hunt.

At an even more subtle level of rhetorical repartee, what may seem merely verbal sparring forges links between the play's reversing of letters and words and its reversals of the conventions of gender. When, for example, Berowne says to one of the Ladies, “Did I not dance with you in Brabant once?” (2.1.114), the Lady replies to him in what appears to be an exact repetition or echoing of his question (“Did I not dance with you in Brabant once?” [115]), apparently simply iterating, Narcissus-and-Echo fashion, the words of a male speaker who comes first. But her apparent repetition, with its pronomial shifters, also shifts the initial direction of Berowne's “I” and “you,” changing the subject and object positions and hence making her into the one who danced with him, in “Brabant” or the Low Countries, with all of the multiple sexual overtones of “danced”:

BER.
Did I not dance with you in Brabant once?
KATH.
Did I not dance with you in Brabant once?

(2.1.114-15)

The Lady's response—far from being an example of simply gratuitous verbal play—enacts a reversal within an apparently iterative “following,” changing the position of subject and object, “I” and “you,” in ways that link this reversal with the later exchange on the sequences of letters and alphabetical literacy, where the positions of “U” and “I” are literally reversed (5.1.53-57).²⁹ As if to underline the reversability of female and male, “I” and “you,” in relation to sexual penetration and pursuit, a whole other bit of wordplay is devoted to the question of who pierces whom, in the paronomastic linking of “person” or “pierce one” (“And if one should be pierc'd, which is the one?” [4.2.83-84]), at the entrance of Jaquenetta or a “soul feminine” in act 4 (2.81). In the exchange of position enacted in the responsive “Did I not dance with you in Brabant once?” or this play on which “one” should be “pierc'd,” the question in the context of the images of suitor/shooter, “pricks,” and “marks” is one of the reversability of subject and object, of who pursues whom, just as the concluding “Tu-whit, to-who” of the play's final song may, in its reminder of the sexual “wit” played on throughout, raise once again the question of the “who.”

It is also important to reexamine, in relation to gender in this play, its repeated pairing and opposing of “reason” and “rhyme,” as well as its multiple references to the vernacular (or mother) tongue. Moth introduces a contrast between “father's wit” and “mother's tongue” as early as act 1 (2.95). And much is made in the play, as we have seen, of verbal “varying” or rhetorical turns as an analogue to the sexual “turns” of women—from the “maid” who serves Costard's “turn” (1.1.299), or the ladies who turn the aristocratic men from their original “intents” (5.2.758), to what Armado calls the “digression” (1.2.16) women represent from the male pursuits of learning and of “arms.” But just as Adam (the “first to bear arms,” as Hamlet puts it) was turned aside by the “fault” of “our grandmother Eve”—or as the sexual “fault” and “low matter” of Jaquenetta diverts the “high manner” of Armado's “style”—so there is a polysemous sense of female “fault” pervading the play's opposition of “reason” and “rhyme.” In the exchange between Berowne and Dumaine on what “follows” what in act 1, something that fails to follow in “reason” is said to follow in “rhyme” (1.1.98), in lines whose “green goose” (slang for “whore”) and “fit” (1.1.98) convey a sense of sexual double entendre, even if we do not hear the sexually suggestive “fallows” in this form of “following.”³⁰ “Rhyme” or “rime” itself, we need to recall, already has links (from Latin rima, “fissure, cleft, or chink”) with the sexual “fault” of woman. (The OED gives “chap, chink, or cleft” as one of the meanings of the spelling rime, the spelling used in the play's early texts.)³¹ It is not surprising, therefore, that the “verses” (from vertere, “to turn”) that accompany the turning of the aristocratic men toward the lesser “matter” of the “sign of she”—verses addressed, after all, to mistresses—are called “guilty rhymes” (4.3.137); that Berowne (though claiming that he will not “groan for Joan” or be guilty of a “thing in rhyme” [4.3.179-80]) has already confessed that “love” has taught him how “to rhyme” (4.3.13); that there is reference amidst the confessions of the Eavesdropping Scene to the “rhymes” that are “guards on wanton Cupid's hose” (4.3.56);³² or that the “love” there described as teaching both “rhyme” and “mallicholy” (4.3.13) calls attention to the link between “rhyme” and “rheum,” the latter, as in the “French disease,” a proverbial consequence of following women.

Such rhetorical and poetic “turning” is associated by the men, as by long-standing masculinist tradition, with the turning, varying, and inconstancy of women. (The female alters, varies, and turns “tropically” in this model of the “soul feminine,” and in so doing undoes the “continent canon” of male integritas.) But this venerable identification of turning, troping, and varying with the stereotypes of variable and sexually “turning” women—a topos that appeals ultimately to the varying or turning of “our grandmother Eve”—is in Love's Labor's Lost revealed (like the stereotype of female garrulitas) to be simply part of the men's image of the “soul feminine,” of all that is proverbially associated with the generic “sign of she.”³³ In fact—as the play goes out of its way to underscore—the actual women characters within it are much less interested in “varying” than the men, whose constancy of will is much more at issue.³⁴ What we encounter instead, for example, is Berowne's attempt to submit the terms of the edict of Navarre to a variation that better suits his will and appetite (4.3.286-362), in the exonerating exercise in rhetorical (as well as actual) variation that justifies the men's varying in act 4 (3), just as in act 1 the first elaborate exercise in verbal “turning” or varying (from “wench” to “damsel” to “virgin” to “maid”) forms part of Costard's attempt to evade the letter of the law (1.1.289-300) by which he stands condemned. The traditional masculine topoi in which the “sign of she” is available both for the cosmetic or “maculate” and for the turns and “colors” of rhetoric are in this Shakespearean play turned around or on their ends: the women (associated with deviation and incontinence) are concerned instead with the reining in of the “will,” with the fidelity or “troth” that is the final measure of the “truth” of words. And by the end of the play that started by evoking Adam's temptation by a woman, “our grandmother Eve,” we have instead clear reference to its reverse, Adam's tempting Eve (“Had he been Adam he had tempted Eve” [5.2.322]).

The reputation of Love's Labor's Lost has been that it is literally obsessed with such “varying” of the letter, with the turns of rhetoric, and with words. “Letters” themselves, of course, form a nexus in the plot in several senses—as the letters of the alphabet that can be reversed (in a play that makes much of the contest between “book-men” and lowly “unlettered”), as the acquisition of literacy that separates the “Arts-man” from what Armado terms the “barbarous” (5.1.81-82), as the letter of the law, and as “post” or mail. The sense of letters as “post” or epistles includes the letter from Armado that accuses Costard in act 1; the letter from Longaville described as “too long by half a mile” (5.2.54); the missive sent by Armado to Jaquenetta and Berowne's letter to Rosaline, which Costard promises to deliver “in print” (3.1.172)—a phrase that means “exactly” or “to the letter”—but which is in fact “miscarried” or misdirected, just as alphabetical letters are elsewhere in the play. References to literacy and the “lettered” include the early reference to Costard as “that unlettered, small-knowing soul” (1.1.250); Armado's query to Holofernes (“Monsieur, are you not lett'red?” [5.1.45]); the alliterative style of Holofernes's “affect the letter” (4.2.54) in the increasingly bawdy exchange on “sore L” and “pricket” in act 4 (2.53-61); and the play on letters in the banter of Rosaline and Katherine in act 5 (“Fair as a text B in a copy-book; my red dominical, my golden letter: / O that your face were not so full of O's!” [5.2.42-45]).³⁵ Letters as the alterers of meaning as of words are repeatedly foregrounded in the play, in its reminders of the instability of orthographic variants (5.1.19-25), sign of an only recently emergent literacy, where the varying of a single letter can transform meaning as well as form—not only varying “det” to “debt,” “dout” to “doubt,” or “abbominable” to “abhominable” (5.1.20-25) but enabling a slipperiness of homophonic play that is less the more modern form of punning (joining what was already separate) than the multiple possibilities for “misprision” and “miscarrying” when clear separation and standardization have not yet occurred.³⁶

This comedy's repeated play on “post” also forges links between the importance within it of “letters”—in all of these senses—and the reversal of “post” and “pre,” “posterior” and front, introduced by the “preposterous event” at its beginning. The “post” shared with “preposterous” is harped on relentlessly as the play proceeds—in the reference to the game of “post and pair” in the scene where the women one-up the men (5.2.67) and in the punning on “post” or letters that form so much of the criss-crossing between main plot and subplot, “high” and “low.”³⁷ When Berowne's letter to Rosaline finally returns to its sender, at the end of the elaborately self-reversing Eavesdropping Scene, a single phrase calls attention to all that is linked together by this “post”—as “mail,” as posting or speeding, and as coming after—when he attempts unsuccessfully to “post from love” (4.3.187).

The play on “post”—and the reversal of before and after—unleashed in the original “preposterous event” also pervades the play's repeated foregrounding of letters in the alphabetical sense. To be “lettered” is to be “singuled” or separated from the “barbarous” (5.1.81-82), in the hierarchy of “high” and “low” defended by the social-climbing “book-men” in act 5. Costard is pointedly disparaged as an “unlettered, small-knowing soul” (1.1.250) when he first appears. But the iteration of this distinction in act 5, in a scene that involves these “Arts-men,” also comes in an exchange where letters themselves are “spell'd backward” (5.1.47) or preposterously reversed:

ARM.
[To Holofernes] Monsieur, are you not lett'red?
MOTH.
Yes, yes, he teaches boys the horn-book. What is a, b spell'd backward, with the horn on his head?
HOL.
Ba, pueritia, with a horn added.
MOTH.
Ba, most silly sheep, with a horn. You hear his learning.
HOL.
Quis, quis, thou consonant?
MOTH.
The last of the five vowels, if ‘you’ repeat them, or the fift, if I.
HOL.
I will repeat them—a, e, I—
MOTH.
The sheep: the other two concludes it—a, U.

(5.1.44-57)

The “preposterous” reversal that turns “ab” into “ba” for sheep (in the context of reference both to the “horn-book” and the cuckold's “horn”) recalls, in its “sheep,” the scene of Costard's arrest for that “most prepost'rous” event, following a woman referred to there, in the familiar slang, as “mutton” (1.1.302), as well as the “sheep” associated with instruction in literacy and the alphabet.³⁸ But it also introduces at the level of the “letter” the possibility of a volte-face of ordering or sequence, something turned “backward” or reversed.

“Post” in the sense of that which follows or comes “behind,” then, links the play's exploitation of the new disciplines of literacy with the delivery of letters in the sense of missives—in a play in which the distinction between “letter'd” and “unletter'd” is part of the attempt to separate “high” from “low” in social terms. “Arts-man, preambulate,” counsels the social-climbing Armado, in his attempt to “singulate” the “book-men” from the unlettered “barbarous” in act 5 (1.81-82), in lines whose “pre-ambulate” literally invite Holofernes the “arts” man to “go before.” But the line itself—despite the attempt to separate or “singulate”—calls attention to the frequently exploited closeness in sound of “Arts” and “Arse,” and hence deflates the attempt to distinguish such “book-men” from the “lowly asses” or barbaroi they pour contempt upon. “Ass” is simultaneously a class word and a distinctly bodily reminder of the arsy-versy. And the play throughout this comedy on the “arsy-versy” or “preposterous”—turning back to front, behind to before—here literally informs the summoning of the familiar association of ars and arse (exploited in the use of “preposterous Ass” for another “arts-man” in The Taming of the Shrew [3.1.9-14]), as Armado issues the invitation to an “Arse-man” to “pre-ambulate” or go before.

The whole exchange, from “Are you not lett'red?” to Armado's “Arts-man, preambulate (and its disdain for the “barbarous”), then leads into an extraordinary series of double entendres on the “posterior,” beginning with the inflated Armado's reference to a “show” to be presented before the Princess in “the posterior of this day, which the rude multitude call the afternoon” (5.1.88-90). Holofernes repeats “posterior of the day” (91) and (with a pun on cul) pronounces the phrase to be “well cull'd” (93): “The posterior of the day … is liable, congruent, and measurable for the afternoon. The word is well cull'd, chose, sweet and apt, I do assure you, sir I do assure” (5.1.91-94). And Armado continues, suggesting that they let “pass” what is “inward” (“I do assure ye, very good friend; for what is inward between us, let it pass …” [96-97]), in a speech whose refrain of “passing” (“let that pass … let that pass” [101-5]) is reiterated as he alludes to his intimacy with the King in lines notorious for their double-meaning “excrement” (“it will please his Grace … sometime to lean upon my poor shoulder, and with his royal finger, thus, dally with my excrement,” glossed only belatedly as “my mustachio” [101-4]), before he ends with talk of “eruptions and sudden breaking out of mirth” (114-15) and Holofernes suggests the Pageant of Worthies as the “show” that should be presented in what again is called “the posterior of this day” (119-22).³⁹

Armado's “Arts-man, preambulate, we will be singuled from the barbarous” (5.1.81-82) comes immediately after the unlettered Costard's confusing of Latin ad unguem (to the “fingers ends”) with “ad dunghill” (5.1.77), in lines that lead not just to the smelling of “false Latin,” as Holofernes puts it (5.1.79), but to the sense of something more unpleasant at the fingers' ends, especially with its proximity to the description of the King's “royal finger” dallying with his “excrement.” The entire passage recalls the packed scene of wordplay in act 3, with its reversal of prior and posterior, “l'envoy” and “salve,” and its enfranchising “egma” or enema, even as it anticipates the “latter end” (5.2.627) and “passing” of the play itself. Once again, a “low matter” brings down a “high manner”; and material, even scatalogical, embodiment is given to the apparently only verbal reversals in the play, drawing attention to what should come “before” and the “post” or “posterior” that comes “after” or behind.

Both the aristocratic men's about-face to what Berowne calls the “opposed end” of their original “intents” (5.2.758) and the earlier wordplay on an envoi, afterword or postscript preposterously confused with a “salve” or beginning, are reflected in the increasingly bodily reminders of the opening “preposterous” as the play proceeds to its own unconventionally open end. Act 5 begins with the book-men, the “abhominable” Armado (5.1.24), and the diminutive “Moth,” whose polyvalent name evokes not only “mot” or “word” and “mote,” as contrasted with “beam” (4.3.159-60), but the more earthbound, material, and bodily—simultaneously “mound,” “clod” or “turfe of earth,” a “butt to shoot at,” and the “gryne” or “groin.”⁴⁰ It then proceeds to yet more reminders of the body's opposed ends, in lines that recall the digestive metaphorics of humanist digestio from the scorning of the illiterate “Dull” in an earlier scene (Nath. Sir, he hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book; / He hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink” [4.2.24-26]) and the “taste” of “arts-men” in whom such matters “fructify” (4.1.25-28).⁴¹ The sense of “fructifying” in this bodily metaphorics of consuming and digesting is joined by Moth's famous reference to the “scraps” of language which these book-men have only imperfectly digested (“They have been at a great feast of languages, and stol'n the scraps” [5.1.37]) and Costard's literalizing of the diminutive Moth or “Mot” as an edible word, ironically the longest and most difficult to spell (Cost. O, they have liv'd long on the alms-basket of words. I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word, for thou art not so long by the head as honorificabilitudinitatibus: thou art easier swallow'd than a flap-dragon [5.1.38-42]).

The scene then leads to the question of whether this “Mot” or word himself is “lett'red” (45), in the lines in which “ab spelled backward, with the horn on his head” (47-48) produces the “ba” and horns or head of a “sheep,” and finally to the exchange that moves from Costard's “ad dunghill” to the book-men's reference to the “posteriors of the day,” in lines that keep body parts and ends continually in view, as they had been in the earlier references to “Ovid the Nose” (“Ovidius Naso was the man. And why, indeed ‘Naso,’ but for smelling out the odiferous flowers of fancy” [4.2.123-25]) and Priscian's head (“Priscian a little scratch'd” [5.1.28-29]). It is here that the “posteriors of the day” for what “the rude multitude call the afternoon” lets loose the whole series of scatalogical double entendres, from Holofernes's “I do assure you, sir, I do assure” and insistence on letting “pass” what is “inward” to the linguistic afflatus of Armado's request to Holofernes and Nathaniel to assist him “to the end” he requests, the “show” that is to be presented “before the Princess” (122) in “the posterior of this day” (119), a “show” in which the lowly Costard “shall pass” (a famously puzzling choice of word) Pompey the Great (5.1.128).⁴² After the iterations of “post” in its various senses through the play, the bodily sense of posterus in the opening act's “obscene and most prepost'rous event” returns, then, in act 5, in the book-men's pretentious (or high) but finally scatalogical (or low) “posteriors of this day” (5.1.119), in a passage literally packed with “arsy-versy” double entendres, from its references to fingers dallying in “excrement” to the repeated refrain of “let that pass,” justifiably translated into the stage gesture of a series of lower bodily emissions, a downwind passing before which Nathaniel (particularly with all these references to “smelling”) might well be directed to hold his nose.

In scenes such as this in Love's Labor's Lost, the bodily reference and scatology implicit within the “preposterous” as the “arsy-versy” emerges unmistakably—not just reversing “posterior” for prior or front but revealing the bodily, “barbarous” or low within the apparently elevated or “high,” even as the importance of separating or “singulating” in social (as well as linguistic) terms is most insisted on. At such moments, the vernacular theatrical tradition—with its preoccupation with bodily orifices and emissions—erupts into the more academic or highbrow theater associated with “book-men” and “book-mates” (4.1.98).⁴³ What is remarkable, however, is the way that such “singulation” (crucial to the “civilizing process” as separation from the “barbarous”) has succeeded in establishing a decorum for most criticism of the play, in which it is difficult to ascertain that there even exists such excremental-scatalogical wordplay or such scenes.

There is even more, however, to be said about this play's exploitation of the arsy-versy or “preposterous” as it approaches its own unconventional end. Preposterous reversal of “back” for “front” is enacted visibly onstage in act 5 when Berowne's attempt to turn the men's “offence” (their turning to the “opposed end” of their “intents”) into its saving reverse, to put a good face on their about-face, is rebuffed by the Princess and her entourage, who literally turn their “backs” to Moth when he reads the men's speech in praise of their “eyes” (5.2.161-62). Whether or not there are subtle reminders here of the familiar posterior or lower-bodily sense of “eyes” as what Chaucer, for example, called the “nether eye,” the stage gesture of the Ladies as they literally turn back to front, presenting their “backs” to the young men's messenger, does abruptly divert the object (and subject) of his Petrarchan petition.⁴⁴ Moth is forced to change the referent of his speech from “eyes” to “backs” (5.2.160-61), when their bodily about-face necessitates a hasty emendation of his prepared address (Moth. A holy parcel of the fairest dames [The Ladies turn their backs to him] / That ever turn'd their—backs—to mortal views!)—prompting Berowne's anxious “Their ‘eyes,’ villain, their ‘eyes’” (5.2.160-62). And though this scene is staged in the register of the aristocratic or “high”—rather than the “base” or social-climbing, as in the exchange with the “Arts-men” just before—what these “fairest dames” actually do onstage is the very reversal of “back” for “front” that the language of the bodily preposterous has harped on throughout—and in lines that simultaneously call attention to the hierarchy of gender, as Boyet counsels Moth to substitute “daughter-beamed eyes” for the “sun-beamed eyes” of his original address (5.2.170).

The Ladies, moreover, counter the men's volte-face or “changing” of their first intent by the Princess's plan to “cross” their new intent (5.2.138), by having each lady “turn away her face” (148) and forcing each man to “Woo contrary” (135) to his intended aim, in the scene of the masquerade in which the ladies are masked and the men disguised as Muscovites. This crossing continues—in this final scene that seems a virtual enactment of the playing on the name of “Longaville” for its length—when, having turned these “Muscovites” away, the ladies follow Rosaline's advice to “mock them still,” by wondering to the men's faces who these ridiculous Muscovites “were, and to what end” their “shallow shows” (5.2.304-5). And it is repeated in the reminders of the “preposterous event” of Costard's “following … a daughter of our grandmother Eve” in the “parleying” in which it is now “Adam”—or the men—who come to tempt “Eve” (5.2.322) to break a vow, in a scene in which even Berowne confesses that his “wit” is “at an end” (5.2.429).

The event to be presented in the “posterior of this day” or afternoon is, of course, the Pageant of Worthies to be played “before the Princess” (5.1.122) at the end of the comedy itself. And it is here that the “posterior” sense of the preposterous or “arsy-versy” is even more insistently emphasized, in the “close-stool” that links “Alisander the Conqueror” with Ajax or “A-jakes” (5.2.575-78) and in the scatalogical punning that accompanies Holofernes's “Judas,” the figure the aristocratic audience seeks to “out-face” or put “out of countenance” (5.2.607) by their ridicule. Holofernes's appearance as the Pageant's “Judas” is relentless in its double entendres on the posterior, as it is on what comes after or behind—from the querying of what follows or comes after his first name (Iscariot or Maccabeus) to the punning on the traditional priority of the “elder” (“Begin, sir, you are my elder. / Well follow'd: Judas was hang'd on an elder” [5.2.605-6]), in lines that invoke the “elder” tree associated elsewhere in Shakespeare with scatalogical play on the “reverence” (or faeces) associated with “elders.”⁴⁵ The lines also suggest a literal, and bodily, reversal of front and back in the interlingual punning that crosses English “face” with French buttocks or fesses, in their playing on the “face” of an “ass” (625), on “cheek” and “half-cheek in a brooch” (616), and on whether the “outfac'd” actor can go “forward” once he has been put back “in countenance” (619-20).⁴⁶ The end of this exchange produces, finally, the harping on the “latter end of his name” (627), producing “Judas” by adding an “ass” to “Jude” (627-28), rendering explicit the play on the “posterior” or “latter end” throughout and calling attention to the intrusion of the low vernacular into the “worthy” or high already lurking within such details as the sound of “Horace” in the scene of “book-men” in act 4 (2.102).

The Pageant in act 5 not only features this sustained “arsy-versy” play, culminating in an “ass” that comes at the “latter end,” but the embodiment of such obscene or lower-bodily references in the appearance of “Pompey the Great,” the “Big,” the “Huge” (5.2.550-57)—a simultaneous exaggeration and deflation that anticipates Alexander the Great or “Big” mispronounced in the Welshman's vernacular as “Alexander the Pig” in Henry V or the references to “Pompey Bum” in Measure for Measure, a play that also prominently features body parts.⁴⁷ “Greater than great, great, great, great Pompey! Pompey the Huge!” (685-86) is played or “parfected” (“I am … to parfect one man in one poor man, Pompion the Great” [501-2]) here by none other than the “base” or lowly Costard himself, and the references to his “great limb or joint” (5.1.128) would justify his appearance onstage, as he enters to “stand for” (5.2.507) this “great,” with the huge codpiece of vernacular stage plays and interludes.⁴⁸ The diminutive Moth (or “mote”) appears as the “Great Hercules,” in a disproportion so marked that it requires an “apology” that asks the audience to imagine Hercules in his infancy (5.2.588-94). The Pageant as a whole, from the perspective of the aristocratic “great” or “magnificent,” exposes lowly “asses” to their ridicule, as untutored actors unable to figure (who instead, as Peter Quince puts it, “disfigure”) the exalted or “Worthy.” In class terms, the insistent scatology of this Pageant Scene might appear to perform the same mockery on these unlettered players as that visited by a similar onstage aristocratic audience on artisan actors led by “Bottom” the “ass” in A Midsummer Night's Dream. But the perspective provided by Holofernes's plaintive “This is not generous, not gentle, not humble” (5.2.629) also enables us to see these aristocratic “worthies” themselves as it were from underneath, from the perspective of the “asses” their mockery seeks to “singule” or distinguish them from, at the same time as the exalted biblical and classical “Worthies” of the Pageant itself (including “Pompey the Huge”) are deflated onstage by a performance that disfigures even as it “stands for” or represents, thereby making greatness “familiar.”⁴⁹

Act 5 also features the bringing down or deflating of the inflated Armado to the service both of the plow and of that “base wench” who had been the object or “low matter” of the play's initial “preposterous event.” Armado speaks with the voice of class shame when—at the mention of the pregnant Jaquenetta, the “weaker vessel” he had stooped to conquer and who has conquered him—he accuses Costard of trying to “infamonize” him “among the potentates” (5.2.678-79).⁵⁰ But there is also a sense of something more at work than simply the satiric or comic when this figure too (revealing that he possesses “no shirt” [5.2.710]) proclaims that he has “seen the day of wrong through the little hole of discretion” (723-24) and announces that he has “vow'd to Jaquenetta to hold the plough for her sweet love three year” (883-84).

There is, finally, at this play's “latter end,” the abrupt entrance that breaks into and breaks off the expected conclusion of a comedy. In the midst of the Pageant that contains reference both to “Jude-ass” and to the “giant limb” of “Pompey the Huge,” Marcade enters as another “envoy” or “embassador” and delivers a different kind of “l'envoy”—the “tale” of death (“my tale is told” [5.2.720]) that prompts the Ladies' “farewell,” a message whose abruptness and finality paradoxically open up the play to an utterly different kind of sequel than the men expect. If the wordplay on the “Jude-ass” who is both “ycliped” and “clipt” (5.2.598-99) introduces the threat of cutting something short, this envoy's abrupt entrance also suddenly abbreviates or cuts short, a fact to which the exchange between the Princess and the King calls explicit attention (5.2.740-43). The harping throughout the play on what should come after and what first or before continues even in this end. The King begs the Princess to remember, in spite of this envoy's intrusion, that “loves argument” was “first on foot” and came before the “cloud of sorrow” that now appears as sad sequel to their merriment (747-48). And he argues for setting joy at “friends … newly found” before grief at “friends lost” or past (749-51). But though the ladies are entreated at what is called not only “the latest minute of the hour” (787) but the “extreme parts of time” (740) to enable the play to “end” in the traditional consummation of comedy (where each “Jack” has his “Gill” [875]), the men are forced instead to agree to an aftermath or sequel (“too long for a play” [878]) that, like Jaquenetta's pregnancy, outlasts both this comedy's onstage end and another traditionally final consummating “point.” If the comedy's expected “catastrophe” (in the simultaneously Greek and comic sense of “end”) is a “nuptial”—as Armado had reminded the audience earlier (4.1.77)—there is no “nuptial” at this end.

Instead, an unexpected and generically unconventional open-endedness disrupts the anticipated comedic end of the play and frustrates what the men had expected as the imminent achievement of this other “point,” the “consummation devoutly to be wished” they were anticipating as their comic due. This Shakespearean comedy, then, comments explicitly on dramatic “ends,” even as it reaches what in the exchange on the end of “Judas” in the “posterior of the day” is termed a “latter end” (5.2.627). Anticipating a sequel that will entail a new beginning, its more provisional onstage ending announces the players' departure as Armado introduces something that “should have followed in the end of our show” (888). And, following the songs, the interrupted play takes its leave with reference to Mercury, yet another “envoy “or “embassador” (“The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo. You that way; we this way. [Exeunt omnes]”). The comic ending of this early Shakespearean comedy is interrupted, then, by the arrival of an ambassador called “Marcade”—an “envoy” whose name is linked with Mercury—and the play ends, as with the earlier scene of wordplay on “envoy” and “embassador” (3.1.52), in anticipation of what Moth there calls a “sequel” (3.1.134).⁵¹ If the usual comic end or “catastrophe” is a “nuptial,” what this play does is to open out rather than close off or contain. Adding a sequel “too long for a play,” it frustrates the expectations established by its own generic signals. And it ends with yet more emphasis on what follows or comes after, as its own epilogue or afterword is formed from the final motto or Mot (“words of Mercury” described as “harsh after the songs of Apollo” [5.2.930-31]) that becomes the play's own enigmatic envoi, send-off or farewell.

The play is filled with reminders of bodily functions (“purge,” “breach,” “prick,” “digest”) and body parts (the “costard” or head broken in a “shin,” the “gryne” or “groin” suggested by the name of Moth, the “foot” of the lowly Jaquenetta, the “head” of Priscian, Ovid the “Nose”). And its extraordinary emphasis on the body's “opposed ends” joins the reversals of “high” and “low,” first and last, prior and posterior that follow from its initial “preposterous event,” beginning with Armado's stooping to the “shoe” of this same Jaquenetta, the “base” or “low matter” whose name (evoking close-stool or “Jakes”) links her to the harping on “base” or scatalogical material. The bodily emphasis in this play also effects continual deflations of “high” to “low”—as when the classical authority of “Horace,” for instance, is heard as “Whore-Ass” in act 4, in ways that remind us of the sounding elsewhere of “Ciceronianus” or “Midas” with scatalogical emphasis on their “latter end.”⁵²

The body, we need also to remark, is related to dramatic structure, in ways suggestively linked with the explicit attention this comedy draws to its own uncomic end. The end of comedy is traditionally a consummating or phallic “point,” as both A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Merry Wives of Windsor make clear.⁵³ In Love's Labor's Lost, as in the dramatic frame of The Taming of the Shrew, it is this phallic completion that (for the men frustratingly) is unconventionally missing, as Berowne complains when the anticipated consummation does not come (“Our wooing doth not end like an old play: / Jack hath not Gill. These ladies' courtesy / Might well have made our sport a comedy” [5.2.874-76]).⁵⁴ The men are left—in ways that directly link a bodily anticipation with a generic one—feeling cheated of the sexual “commodity” and closural “point” that is an expected part of the genre of “comedy.” And the first of the songs offered at its provisional close raises yet again the specter of another kind of female breaching, cuckoldry as the “word of fear” (5.2.901) that has been an undertone of all the references to “horns,” “horn-books,” and the dangers of associating with the “sign of she.”⁵⁵

The other traditional bodily metaphor for dramatic structure is, of course, catharsis, literally a “purging,” the Greek term translated into Latin as purgatio. “Catharsis” in the dramatic sense is analogous to the bodily, even medical, activity of purging, in ways important to keep in mind when we consider the centrality of images of purging, purgatives, and purgation in Love's Labor's Lost, where the penance enjoined on the young aristocratic men as a sequel to its onstage end is a form of purgatorial or purgative cleansing—in Berowne's case associated directly with the ailing or “sick.”⁵⁶ Purging, decay, and death, or final “passing,” provide, in the period contemporary with the play, figures (along with women) of what looses or causes breaches in the “continence” and enclosure of the classical male body, in contrast to the base grotesque or “faulty” female one.⁵⁷ And the early Shakespearean comedy that calls explicit attention to its own unconventional open-endedness—an end that involves, as one critic remarks, not only “a breach of theatrical promise” but a breaching of generic coherence—opens onto an aftermath or sequel that disrupts the conventional closure and enclosures of the classically well-made play.⁵⁸

Love's Labor's Lost ends with lofty reminders of the classical figures of Apollo and Mercury. But it also ends after an event held in “the posteriors of the day,” and in ways that recall not just the exchange on “l'envoy” and “embassador” from act 3 but the bodily play on “passing” in the scene of the Arts (or Ars)-men in act 5. “L'envoy”—as “end”—was used in this period, as earlier remarked, for dramatic conclusion or “catastrophe,” while “catastrophe” (Armado's term) appears elsewhere in Shakespeare in the contemporary slang sense of posterior, backside or bodily end (2 Henry IV 2.1.60).⁵⁹ It may well then be the place here to recall, at this play's own “latter end,” the simultaneously bodily and structural variation on ends in the scene of the “enigma” or “egma” that produced the earlier “sequel” and “envoy” of act 3, or the “enfranchisement” from “immured” containment (3.1.12-124) associated there both with “purgation” (3.1.126) and with the breaching of the continence and enclosures of the all-male “academe.” For when in act 5 Marcade, another “envoy,” breaks into this comedy with the uncomic news of the “catastrophe” of death, and hence the tragic note of another kind of passing and enfranchisement, there is “catastrophe” in its other sense of “overturning,” and an opening out onto more than can be contained in comedy.⁶⁰

What, then, is at stake in all of this “preposterous” or “arsy-versy” play—on after and before, posterior and prior, back and front, an envoi or end anticipating beginning—that literally pervades this early Shakespearean play, not just at the level of the letter, or verbal turn, but in the structuring of stage gestures and entire scenes? And what is at stake in the repeated reduction of the decorous, elevated, or high to the “base,” bodily, and low in a play that has had the reputation of being formal, stilted, and academic, concerned with “mere” rhetoric and “mere” words? It should be clear, first, from the class and gender implications of its antithetical turns and pointed repartee that a criticism that separates the linguistic or rhetorical from the bodily or “obscene”—or discursive structures from social ones—depends on historically more modern and hence anachronistic assumptions; that what has filtered perceptions of Love's Labor's Lost is the later triumph of precisely the decorum (and “singulation” from the “barbarous”) that is pilloried in this play, yielding readings in which the links between its unmistakable bodily and “posterior” wordplay and its reversals of first and second, high and low, postscript and preamble, end and beginning, have gone either unnoticed or discreetly unmentioned.

In relation to this play's “preposterous” overturning of relationships of class and gender, we need to note that the body itself is cast in the plot in explicitly class and gender terms. In the opening scene of Navarre's “continent canon” and the all-male oath, Dumaine's “My loving lord, Dumaine is mortified: / The grosser manner of these world's delights / He throws upon the gross world's baser slaves” (1.1.28-30) introduces the familiar mind-body hierarchy of high and low in which it is only “baser slaves” who embody enslavement to the “flesh,” and in which trafficking with women is part of the “low matter” of this baser impulse. Dumaine's deprecatory class sneer is joined later in the play by reminders of social hierarchy and class difference, in Berowne's “Some men must love my lady [i.e., a gentlewoman] and some Joan” (the stock name for a peasant wench, echoed in the “greasy Joan” of the final song) (3.1.205) or the social-climbing Armado's “I am ill at reck'ning, it fitteth the spirit of a tapster” (1.2.40-41). As if to embody the hierarchy—and differentiation—of the aristocratic Dumaine's attempt to “singulate” himself and his peers from “the gross world's baser slaves,” the first to follow the dictates of the “flesh” is, of course, the “shallow vassal” Costard, taken by Jaquenetta, a “wench” of his own class.

As the play proceeds, however, the initial “preposterous event” for which the “base” Costard is imprisoned becomes the “president” or precedent for the series of defections to the “flesh” on the part of his social betters. The “obscene and most preposterous event” that stands at the opening of this comedy as the “head” or first of an entire series becomes, then, the emblem of its preposterous reversals of “high” and “low” in the body politic as well. Similarly, when in act 4 of the play Constable Dull confuses the high-flown Latin of Holofernes's haud credo with the like-sounding “old grey doe” of his lowlier vernacular or mother tongue and objects that the victim of the hunt was emphatically not a doe but a “pricket” (4.2.11-12), the emphasis is not so much on the “monster Ignorance” that Holofernes hastens to decry, or on sympathy for the learning it has thus “deformed” (4.2.23), as it is on the pretensions of the social-climbing “book-men” (4.2.34) and their imitative “following” of humanist discipline. (The “little academe” [1.1.13] of aristocratic “book-mates” [4.1.98] is also “deformed,” as Berowne puts it [5.2.757], by being diverted to the “opposed end” of the original oath.) The play's multiple forms of mis-taking the word (Two Gentlemen 3.1.284)—including the misprision and mistaking associated with the illiterate or “barbarous”—are closer to the continual verbal misprision, and pricking of pretension, that animates the play itself. The parody-humanists of the play stand exposed in their own deformations of learning when the “book-man” Holofernes sings the scale in the wrong order or out of turn (4.2.100), or when the description of the services he performs for the “commonwealth” (75) has a ring that is decidedly sexual (“their sons are well tutor'd by you and their daughters profit very greatly under you”), in lines that remind us of the sense of “under” and “understanding” elsewhere in Shakespeare and of the familiar pederastic sense of “tutoring.” The reduction of the artes to their bodily counterparts does not so much authorize a “high” or mocking reading of the “low” (a version of the “over-view” Berowne claims to have in the Eavesdropping Scene, before he too is brought low) as it exposes, by the very insistence on the bodily, the undoing of high “manner” or “stile” by lowly matters of all kinds.

Focusing on the play's initial “preposterous event” and its reflection in the (verbal and bodily) turns and “arsy-versy” reversals of “proper” ordering that fill this play—of “base” for high, female for male, back for front, “b” for “a,” end for beginning—would enable us not simply to become aware of the implications of more of this play's extraordinary verbal texture but to examine the relation of what might appear the “merely” verbal to preposterous social reversals (and their bodily counterparts), in registers where the “preposterous” functions as a marker of gender as well as of class. In this sense, this early Shakespearean exploitation of the senses of the “preposterous” (in a comedy that calls attention to its overturning of conventional dramatic ends) furnishes a prophetic instance of a structure and implications that were to recur throughout the Shakespeare canon.⁶¹ And it provides an early Shakespearean example of the linking of the apparently only verbal, logical, or rhetorical with the body (and body politic) in ways that would enable reexamination of this canon in relation to the newly emergent (and soon to be dominant) disciplines of the new humanist elites, their production of a decorum of “singulating” or separating that was to become part of the attempt to eliminate “barbarisms” of all kinds.⁶² To explore the Shakespearean resonances of the “preposterous,” then, is to engage in a reconsideration of wordplay and structural play not simply for formal reasons (though closer reading would help counter a critical tradition shaped by this decorum) but for reasons that situate both the play and this critical myopia within a broader early modern history, a history of the ordering (and “civilizing”) of both body and body politic.⁶³

There is one other historical element, finally, in this play on which traditional criticism has also been silent, one that has to do with another early modern resonance of the “preposterous.” “To be taken in the manner” in the scene of Costard's arrest is the English equivalent of capta cum manu-opere—being caught “red-handed” or in the act, as Costard has been.⁶⁴ Curious echoes of this “manu-opere” continue in the play throughout on “manu,” the manual, or what is done by “hand,” not only in the letter to a “snow-white hand” (4.2.132-33) that passes instead through baser hands but in the transformation of ad unguem or the “fingers ends” to the “ad dunghill” and “I smell false Latin” of a later scene, along with the implications of all the uses to which the “hand” is put.⁶⁵ To be taken with the “manner” in this scene in act 1 is also, however, to be taken with a “man.” (This is the “obscene event” the 1611 Bible refers to in the Book of Numbers: “And a man lie with her carnally … and there be no witness against her, neither she be taken with the manner …” [5.13; emphasis mine].)

One example of being taken “in the manner” in this period was the apprehending of Venus and Mars in flagrante delicto: “when Venus and Mars were in bed together they were deprehended or taken in the manner, as we say.”⁶⁶ But Costard's “taken in the manner” also summons the contemporary link, noted by the OED, between “manner” (or mainour) and “manure” (interchangeable in sixteenth-century English spelling) and (in combination with Armado's “obscene and most preposterous event”) not just the sense picked up in the later play on “dunghill” and “excrement” in act 5 but the contemporary sense of the “preposterous” as “unnatural” sexual entry from the wrong end round, arsy-versy or back to front.⁶⁷ We have already noted this play's reversal of “backs” for “eyes” in the scene where the Ladies turn their “backs” to the men's address, the reversal of buttocks or “fesses” for “face” in the exchange on “cheeks” and the “latter end” of “Judas” in act 5, and the links Stephen Booth has suggested between “l'envoy” and buttocks in act 3. We also, however, need to note that “preposterous” was the early modern English term for sodomy as the sexually back to front, “arsy-versy” or wrong way round, an inversion understood as “against nature,” as bestial, and as “obscene,” and hence another resonance for the “obscene and most preposterous event” of a passage that makes reference to “beasts” who “graze,” to “following” or “fallowing,” and to the “manner of men.”⁶⁸ That “preposterous” in the period was one of the code terms for the sexually “arsy-versy” is made unmistakably clear by the frequency of its appearance—in Florio's reference to “unnatural and preposterous loves” when “more by custome than by nature … men [do] meddle and abuse themselves with men,” in Jonson's Every Man in His Humour (“for a more instance of their preposterous natures … they have assaulted me … as I have walkt alone, in divers skirts i' the towne”), or in the context of all the contemporary double entendres on “back door” and “posterne door” (such as the “back-door'd Italian” of Dekker and Middleton's Honest Whore, the remark in Middleton's Michaelmas Term that it is “such an Italian world, many men know not before from behind,” or Nashe's reference to “the posterior Italian and Germane cornugraphers” who “canonize unnaturall sodomitrie”).⁶⁹ But it is also made clear from its appearance in Shakespeare in particular, not just in the hints of this bodily inversion in the “preposterous ass” of The Taming of the Shrew but in the explicit reference in Troilus and Cressida (5.1.23-24) to Achilles and Patroclus, his “masculine whore,” as “preposterous discoveries.”

Resonances of the “arsy-versy” in this sense would not be unexpected in a transvestite theater whose use of boys to play female roles was itself denounced as trafficking in such “preposterous” inversion. William Rankins's antitheatrical Mirror of Monsters (1587) inveighs against the “unnaturall” monstrosity of players, “whether grounded by nature or insinuated by some preposterous education” (fol. 17), while Phillip Stubbes's Anatomy of Abuses (1583) condemns such “preposterous geare, when Gods ordinance is turned topsie turvie, upside downe” (fol. 102v), relying like other antitheatrical diatribes on the prohibition against cross-dressing from Deuteronomy 22.5, and the gloss that such “were to alter ye ordre of nature, & to despise God” (Geneva Bible). Jaquenetta (the subject of the play's initial “preposterous event”) was played, after all, not by a “wench” but by a transvestite boy. Perhaps this—as in the predicament of Sly in Shrew or that of Dr. Caius and others in Shakespeare's Merry Wives—is another reason why Love's Labor's Lost cannot end with the “consummation” of “Jack” and “Gill.”

To critics who treat Love's Labor's Lost as simply bookish and esoteric, with the assumption that this implies a decorum separated both from the bodily and from the pederastic or sodomitical, we need to respond with the reminder that this other sense of the “preposterous” not only fits the more general context of an English transvestite theater but the particularities of the play itself, a play that not only contains references like the ones to Holofernes's tutoring in a culture where “tutor” had specifically pederastic overtones, but a plot that begins by evoking the all-male circle of a Platonic “academe,” where much is made of the fact that, with women excluded (in the topos of the paradise perfect but for the presence of the “sign of she”), the men's pastime or entertainment is to come instead from the “magnificent” Don, the play's representative Iberian, a region proverbially associated with “preposterous venery.” It is also not out of place in a play in which, when this same Armado asks, “Who was Sampson's love, my dear Moth?” the answer comes cheekily back, “A woman, master” (1.2.76-77), as if that were not the only possible alternative.⁷⁰

Like the excremental and scatalogical, the sodomitical and homoerotic aspect of “Shakespeare's bawdy” has been one that traditional criticism has been slow or reluctant to recognize, even in examples like the “open arse” of Romeo and Juliet (2.1.38) that Joseph Porter has recently analyzed, or such “posterior” play as the reference to “Preposterous ass” in the lines from The Taming of the Shrew directed to a master of “arts” (3.1.9).⁷¹ “Preposterous venery”—and even more importantly, its relation to the inversion of other kinds of ordering deemed “proper” and “natural”—has only recently become part of a serious reconsideration of the context and culture contemporary with Shakespeare.⁷² And it still for the most part has not been part of an attentive reading of the language and double entendres of the plays themselves. In this respect, too, rereading the Shakespearean “preposterous”—in Love's Labor's Lost as in the plays that were to ensue—involves a labor that is at once historical and linguistic, a labor whose most important task is to counter the anachronistic lenses through which the play has been viewed, the product of a history in which such matters become first the unspeakable and then pass into the realm not just of the unmentionable but the unseen.

Notes

1. Except where noted otherwise, the edition used throughout is The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), and italics are mine.

2. See John Barret, An Alvearie or Quadruple Dictionarie (London, 1580), for prepostere as “backward; overthwartly: arsieversie: contrary to al good order”; Richard Huloet, Abcedarium (London, 1552), for “preposterouse, out of order, overthwharth, transverted, or last done which by rule have ben first”; and Randle Cotgrave, Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (London, 1611), for préposterer as “turne arsivarsie; to put the cart before the horse.”

3. See Genesis 2, cited with “other thinges set in ordre,” in “The Fourme of Solemnizacion of Matrimonie,” in The Booke of Common Prayer (London, 1552); the link between hysteron proteron or “the preposterous” and the inversion of the “proper” and “natural” order of male and female in Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (London, 1593 ed.), 118-19; Richard Taverner, Proverbs or Adages, gathered out of the Chiliades of Erasmus (London, 1569); and Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies (London: Methuen, 1987), 67-69, 112.

4. I use contaminated here with the full resonance of early modern contaminatio and because the play itself suggests it in the exchange on allusion, collusion, and pollution in 4.2.42-46.

5. See Edward J. White, Commentaries on the Law in Shakespeare (St. Louis, Mo.: F. H. Thomas Law Book Co., 1913), 93-94, on Armado's letter as following “the charging part of a common law indictment.”

6. On varying, see T. W. Baldwin, William Shakespeare's Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), 2:192.

7. The phrase comes, of course, from Norbert Elias, The History of Manners, vol. 1 of The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

8. For Shakespeare's parodic use of divisio elsewhere, see Baldwin, 2:91-93, and Hamlet, where the First Clown says, “An act hath three branches: it is, to act, to do, and to perform” (5.1.11-12).

9. See the Arden edition of Love's Labour's Lost, ed. Richard David (London: Methuen, 1951), 14.

10. See Gail Kern Paster, “Leaky Vessels: The Incontinent Women of City Comedy,” Renaissance Drama, n.s., 18 (1987): 43-65; and, on the bodily and sexual fault or crack of woman in relation to the Fall and the fault of Eve, Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers (New York: Routledge, 1992), chap. 2.

11. See “Coming Second: Woman's Place,” in Parker, 180.

12. Berowne actually calls himself a “sheep” in this scene (4.3.7), where he acknowledges his “coursing” after or pursuing love (4.3.1). “Geese” (referred to often in this play) are also used in contemporary texts for slavish imitatio or “following.” See, for example, the lines “Let those doters on Apollo / That adore the Muses, so, / (And, like Geese, each other follow),” in George Wither, Fair—Virtue, the Mistress of Phil'arete (London, 1622).

13. Stephen Booth, King Lear, Macbeth, Indefinition, and Tragedy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983), 73. Booth's brilliant brief treatment remains an exception among the works of major Shakespearean critics for its attention to the bodily and scatalogical. For treatments of the play that stress the play's indulgence in language and verbal play for its own sake, see James L. Calderwood, “Love's Labour's Lost: A Wantoning with Words,” Studies in English Literature 5 (1965): 317-18; and Calderwood's statement in Shakespearean Metadrama (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 56: “In perhaps no other play does language so nearly become an autonomous symbolic system whose value lies less in its relevance to reality than in its intrinsic fascination.” See also A. C. Hamilton, The Early Shakespeare (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1967), 135. For an overview of this bias in the criticism, see Jane Donawerth, Shakespeare and the Sixteenth-Century Study of Language (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984); and, more recently, Katherine Maus, “Transfer of Title in Love's Labor's Lost: Language, Individualism, Gender,” in Shakespeare Left and Right, ed. Ivo Kamps (New York: Routledge, 1991), 205-24, esp. 206-7, where Maus notes “the verbal exorbitance for which Love's Labor's Lost has long been condemned” and the omission of the play's sexual politics even from the discussions of William Carroll in The Great Feast of Language in “Loves Labors Lost” (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976) and Keir Elam in Shakespeare's Universe of Discourse: Language Games in the Comedies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), which take its language more seriously. Maus's own essay, while treating of some important aspects of gender in the play, acknowledges its omission of considerations of class and social hierarchy.

14. For the frequency of structures of verbal reversal in the play, see Donawerth, 153-54.

15. The Arden editor (49) notes the same punning on salve for a sore and the greeting salve in Robert Greene's Mamillia, the source text for The Winter's Tale, along with Steevens's quoting of the same quibble from Aristippus, or The Jovial Philosopher (1630).

16. On the “plain plantan” and on Harvey and l'envoy as “an address or send-off, usually placed at the end of a prose or poetical composition,” see Arden edition, 49. The OED notes that plantan comes from planta, “sole of the foot,” which its broad prostrate leaves resemble. We might also note the link in sound with âne.

17. For the sense of sexual disappointment, see Arden edition, 48. For the monetary sense, see OED, compact ed. (1971), s.v. “shin.”

18. Have with you to Saffron Walden, or Gabriell Harveys Hunt is up (1596), in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, 5 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), 3:235. Nashe's first mention of Harvey's “l'envoy” (Epistle Dedicatorie, 11) is accompanied by mention of “the most contemptible Mounsier Aiaxes of excrementall conceipts”; his second occurs in the midst of a passage on literary “presidents,” which includes reference to a “iakes” and “groaning stoole.” Nashe pours scorn on Harvey's “tynie titmouse lenvoy” and then writes of “another Lenvoy for the chape of it, his Stanza declarative, Writers post-script in meeter, his knitting up Cloase, and a third Lenvoy, like a fart after a good stoole” (132-33). See also Nashe's treatment of Harvey's “method of Lenvoyes, Post-scripts and Preambles” (135); and “ware you break not your shins in the third line on preambles and postambles” and the mention of a “latter end” by Piers Pennilesse (117). For playing on enigma and enema, see Nashe, 15; and Herbert A. Ellis, Shakespeare's Lusty Punning in “Love's Labour's Lost” (The Hague: Mouton, 1973), 125-27 and 88: “Kökeritz believes that Costard ‘may have misinterpreted riddle as a variant of reddle or ruddle.’ To me raddle ‘a stout stick or pole, the rail of a cart’ (OED) seems a more likely surmise, since Costard evidently dreaded some sort of painful clyster [i.e., enema]. Riddle is an obsolete variant of raddle, itself ‘obs. exc. dial’ (OED).” Ellis earlier notes that argument in this scene can also mean clyster or enema as well as vagina (35).

19. On goose as “fool,” as well as the “Winchester goose” (prostitute and venereal disease), see Arden edition, 50; and the OED on the sense of “tailor's smoothing iron” (from the resemblance of the handle to the shape of a goose's neck), as in Macbeth 2.3.17 (“Come in taylor, here you may roast your goose”). On the suggestions in l'envoy of the blindworm whose opposed ends are easily confused, see Ellis: “L'envoy, a French word which is regularly italicized in the Quarto, though never glossed other than in its literary sense, means (or meant) also the anguis fragilis, a legless lizard. Cotgrave, s.v. ‘Envoye,’ has ‘Looke Ennoye,’ whereunder we find: ‘A certaine venemous worme, which going both wayes, and having (as a ground-worme) her head, and tayle of one bignesse, is said to have two heads.’” Ellis speculates not only on the “phallic suggestibility” of this association but on the possibility that the form of the envoy or blindworm “suggested to Costard the dreaded clyster-pipe.” He further notes that “should an envoy, or slowworm, fall in the way of a goose, it would surely end in the goose. Morever, oie, or in Cotgrave oye, is French for goose; the word itself ends ‘in the Goose’” (58-59). Cotgrave also gives: “Envoy. A message, or sending; also th'Envoy, or conclusion of a Ballet, or Sonnet; in a short stanza by it self, and serving, oftentimes, as a dedication of the whole”; “Envoyé. A speciall messenger sent by a Prince unto his Embassador in a forreine countrey”; “Envoyé. Sent; delegated; addressed or directed, unto; also, cast or thrust, out.” See also Claude Desainliens, A Dictionary French and English (London, 1593), which gives for envoy both “message, sending” and “the foote of a song.” See also the “Envois” and “Seven: Postscript” sections of Jacques Derrida, The Post Card, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).

20. See, for example, the Riverside gloss, 189; and Booth, 70.

21. Ellis comments on the Quarto's “no egma, no riddle, no lenvoy, no salve, in thee male sir” as follows: “Male, which most editions (notably the Arden, Penguin, and New Cambridge) see as mail ‘wallet, budget, bag’, whence ‘no salve in thee male’ means ‘no ointment in the bag’, almost certainly has the alternate meaning ‘the male animal’. Thus Costard, apparently dreading some sort of enema, confuses salve ‘ointment’ with salve or salvo ‘a discharge of firearms’, thinking of the same type of metaphor used by Mr. Thomas Brown in ‘The Dispensary, A Farce’ (1697)” (57), which treats of a “Clyster-pipe” meant to “cannonade” a character's “posteriors.”

22. See OED, s.v. “envoy,” sense 1b, for “conclusion of a play; also a catastrophe, denouement.” The OED cites Ben Jonson's Silent Woman 5.3, “And then the women (as I have given the bride her instructions) to break in upon him, i' the l'envoy,” and Massinger's Bashful Lover 5.1, “Long since I look'd for this l'envoy.”

23. The bodily metaphors of what can be contained or digested in a play are also suggested in Henry V (2.Chorus.31-32) and Troilus and Cressida (Prol. 29).

24. On this elaborate patterning, see Harry Levin, “Sitting in the Sky (Love's Labor's Lost 4.3),” in Shakespeare's “Rough Magic”: Renaissance Essays in Honor of C. L. Barber, ed. Peter Erickson and Coppélia Kahn (London: Associated University Presses, 1985), 113-30, esp. 120-22, 129 (diagram). The scene's reverse patterning also suggests the nearness of chiasmus and hysteron proteron as tropes of rhetorical reversal.

25. Berowne describes Rosaline as “one that will do the deed / Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard” (3.1.198-99).

26. See Ruth Nevo, Comic Transformations in Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1980), 77, on remuneration and guerdon.

27. See Maus, 215.

28. For the suggestion of the replacement of the mutilation of Philomela, see Maus, 215-16; on shooter/suitor, see Ellis, 188.

29. For Shakespearean play on the sexual overtones of the Low Countries or Netherlands, see The Comedy of Errors (3.2.138-39). In the lines on the alphabet in act 5 that involve play on horn-book and hence on sheep, if Holofernes repeats the five vowels, his speaking “I” is still, when Moth interrupts, the sheep or ewe; and when Moth takes over as the speaking “I” and concludes the list of vowels with “U,” the “you” (ewe) he addresses is still Holofernes.

30. See Ellis on fit (50) and on the links between following and sexual fallowing (132-33). See also Kökeritz on the rime/frost quibble (140ff.) and Booth on green goose (71).

31. For rhyme in relation to the female genitalia, see John J. Winkler, The Constraints of Desire (New York: Routledge, 1990), 219.

32. The full lines here are “Rhymes are guards on wanton Cupid's hose: / Disfigure not his shop” (56-57). The Quarto's “shop” evokes the organ of generation, while the lines as a whole recall the earlier description of Cupid as “dread prince of plackets, king of codpieces” (3.1.184). See the Arden editor's defense of the Quarto text here (91).

33. For the tradition of female troping, turning, and varying, see R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), chaps. 1-2.

34. See Maus, 214; Calderwood, “Wantoning,” 325; and David Bevington, “‘Jack Hath Not Jill’: Failed Courtship in Lyly and Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Survey 42 (1990): 1-13.

35. On sorrel and sore L, see Ellis, 192.

36. See Margreta de Grazia, “Homonyms before and after Lexical Standardization,” Deutsche Shakespeare-Gesellschaft West Jahrbuch, 1990:144-45; and Donawerth, 144-47.

37. On the crossed letters, see Nevo, 74.

38. On the use of Spanish oueia (sheep) as a mnemonic for the vowels, see Frances A. Yates, A Study of “Love's Labour's Lost” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936); and Arden edition, 118.

39. See Ellis, 46-47; and Booth, 73.

40. For this range of meaning, see the dictionaries of Cotgrave (n. 2) and Desainliens (n. 19). Moth is often spelled Mote in modern editions of the play.

41. The ingestive/digestive language also appears in Berowne's description of Boyet (“This fellow pecks up wit as pigeons pease” [5.2.315]) and in Moth's “swallow'd love with singing love, sometime through [the] nose, as if you snuff'd up love by smelling love” (3.1.15-17).

42. The Quarto text here is “this swaine (because of his great lim or ioynt) shall passe Pompey the great,” part of the same exchange as the refrain “let it passe” and the reference to the “posterior of the day.” For editorial commentary on this crux, see A New Variorum Edition of the Plays of Shakespeare: Love's Labour's Lost, ed. Horace Howard Furness, 3d ed. (1904; rpt. New York: Dover, 1935), 227. Whatever pass means here—editors suggest various glosses—the term forges links elsewhere in this scene with passing.

43. For the newly emergent humanist elites and an argument that distances Shakespeare from them, see John D. Cox, Shakespeare and the Dramaturgy of Power (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), esp. chaps. 3-4.

44. There may even be a reminder of the vulgar sense of eyes as what Chaucer, for example, called the “nether eye.” On the anti-Petrarchanism of the play (including the role of eyes) and its mockery of overly spiritualized notions of love, see Neal L. Goldstien, “Love's Labour's Lost and the Renaissance Vision of Love,” Shakespeare Quarterly 25 (1974): 335-50, esp. 339-40, 342-46.

45. For reverence as contemporary slang for “excrement,” see Eric Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy (New York: Dutton, 1948); Ellis, 86; and As You Like It (“I have as much of my father in me as you, albeit I confess your coming before me is nearer to his reverence” [1.1.49-51]). See also Frankie Rubinstein, A Dictionary of Shakespeare's Sexual Puns and Their Significance (London: Macmillan, 1984), 86. Rubinstein glosses elder here as both “ass” and “arse-related,” citing French aisne or “eldest” and asne or “ass, fool,” and notes that the elderberry was used as a laxative or diuretic: “Laurel for a garland, or elder for a disgrace” (Lyle, Alexander and Campaspe) and “Let the stinking elder, grief, untwine” (Cymbeline 4.2.60).

46. Barret defines “face, or visage” as the “pars anterior.” French fesses is, of course, the “pars posterior.” See also Ellis on fesse and confess (43).

47. See Ellis on the sexual suggestiveness of pomp or pump (177, 179).

48. Appearance with a huge codpiece would also be justified by Berowne's earlier description of “Dan Cupid” as “dread prince of plackets, king of codpieces.” See also Sir John Harington, A New Discourse of a Stale Subject; or, The Metamorphoses of Ajax, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), 60, on pompeon as a melon with certain properties.

49. See Stephen Orgel, “Making Greatness Familiar,” in The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim, 1982), and the King's worry that the lowly actors will “shame us” before the “show” begins (5.2.511-13).

50. The wordplay here underlines the reversal involved for this social climber, as it moves from his request to the Princess (“Sweet royalty”) to “bestow” on him the “sense of hearing” (playing on the familiar homophone of hearing, earing, or bearing) to his focus on her shoe, recalling his earlier stooping to Jaquenetta's foot and shoe: Arm. I do adore thy sweet Grace's slipper. Boy. Loves her by the foot. Dum. He may not by the yard” (667-69).

51. On the importance of Mercury in Love's Labor's Lost, see Levin, “Sitting in the Sky,” 124 (n. 24). On Mercury and Marcade or Mercade, see Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare's Talking Animals: Language and Drama in Society (London: Arnold, 1973), 70; and Joseph A. Porter, Shakespeare's Mercutio (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 209. In relation to the body's end, mercury was a well-known cure or salve for venereal disease. As Hawkes points out, the 1598 Quarto ends with, “The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo,” a line “attributed to no particular character, and … set in a type larger than that used for the printing of the main body of the play” (69). In the Folio, the line “is assigned to the ‘Braggart’ (i.e. Armado) who adds ‘You that way: we this way’ as an exit-line for the characters assembled on the stage” (70). Hawkes counters E. K. Chambers's view that “Mercury has nothing to do with what precedes” (William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, vol. 1 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930], 338). He underscores Mercury's role as messenger and his links with language, writing, and “letters to write lies withal” (Nashe, Summer's Last Will and Testament, ll. 1262ff.), and also stresses the links between Mercury and “Mercade the messenger,” who intrudes into “the Apollonian atmosphere of the play” (69-70).

52. See further the exchange in which Costard asks for the “head lady” and the Princess responds, “Thou shalt know her, fellow, by the rest that have no heads” (4.1.43-45), playing on bodily high and low, heads and maidenheads. Other Renaissance examples include the puns on anus in “Ciceronianus,” in Erasmus's “Echo” colloquy, and the play on Aristotle's “Posterior Analytics” in Harington (43).

53. “After we had embrac'd, kiss'd, protested, and, as it were, spoke the prologue of our comedy” (Merry Wives 3.4.73-75) implies where this comic prologue will lead, and Bottom's “so grow to a point” (Midsummer Night's Dream 1.2.9) suggests the consummating end that makes a marriage play.

54. See Leah Marcus, “Levelling Shakespeare: Local Customs and Local Texts,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 168-78. Marcus stresses that the play is “radically unfinished.” See also Levin, “Sitting in the Sky,” on the play's lack of “festive consummation” (113).

55. See Maus, passim, for treatment of the pervasiveness of the fear of cuckoldry in the play.

56. Calderwood notes the satire of “the French ladies, which operates upon the scholars with the aim of purging them of faults” (“Wantoning,” 329). See also Ellis on the link between purging and perjury.

57. See Gail Kern Paster's recent Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), 131. Though Paster mentions Love's Labor's Lost only elliptically, she does cite the opposition between the open grotesque and the closed-off or finished classical body in Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). Bakhtin is highly suggestive for questions of closure and enclosure in this play.

58. Nevo describes the open end as “a breach of theatrical promises which seriously disrupts, or challenges, our retrospective reconstructions of the play's coherence” (85-91). She stresses Love's Labor's Lost's frustration of generic comic expectations, against C. L. Barber's attempt to rescue the play for festive comedy (Shakespeare's Festive Comedy [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1959], 93-113). Nevo cites, among others, Philip Edwards, Shakespeare and the Confines of Art (London: Methuen, 1968), 37.

59. See “tickle your catastrophe” (2 Henry IV 2.1.60) and “catastrophe of the old comedy” (King Lear 1.2.46). On catastrophe for backside, see OED and Giorgio Melchiori, ed., The Second Part of King Henry IV (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 85. In Greek, catastrophe means “overturning” or sudden turn, as well as “end.” John Minsheu, Ductor in linguas (London, 1617), cites “converto” as one of the senses of catastrophe. On the use of l'envoy for dramatic end or catastrophe, see n. 22.

60. The link between catharsis as both dramatic process and bodily purging has been suggested by Frank Whigham, “Reading Social Conflict in the Alimentary Tract: More on the Body in Renaissance Drama,” ELH 55 (1988): 333-50. Whigham notes the link in All's Well That Ends Well between “the king's nether end,” fistula, and the play's end. He also sees anal inversion as related to questions of class confusion, social upstarts, and other social disruptions. See also Kenneth Burke, “The Thinking of the Body: Comments on the Imagery of Catharsis in Literature,” in Language as Symbolic Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 308-43.

61. For the exploitation of the preposterous in other plays of Shakespeare, see Patricia Parker, “Preposterous Events,” Shakespeare Quarterly 43 (1992): 186-213.

62. On these new elites, see Cox, esp. chap. 3. This purging would ultimately also include purging the theater itself of its lowlife clowns.

63. See Mary Douglas's linking of body function—ingestion, evacuation, and the like—and the social body in Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), 4. Along with Douglas's Natural Symbols (New York: Pantheon, 1970), esp. 65-81, Purity and Danger still provides an important framework for approaching linkages between the bodily and the body politic.

64. On “taken with the manner,” White says: “These lines refer to an arrest upon ‘hue and cry,’ when the thief is found with the stolen property on his person. Of this term Halliwell quotes from Termes de la Ley: ‘Maynour is when a thief has stolen and is followed with Hue and Cry, and taken, having that upon him, which he stole, and it is called Maynour. And so we used to say, when we find one doing of an unlawful act, that we took him with the Maynour, or Manner” (92). For “taken in the manner” in Shakespeare, see Richard II 5.6.9, Hamlet 1.4.15, The Taming of the Shrew 1.1.247, All's Well 4.5.91, and 2 Henry IV 2.4.347.

65. For the running motif of hand throughout the play, see “manu cita” (or “with ready hand”) in the Riverside edition, 5.1.69, and 4.1.145, 4.2.132, 4.2.125, 4.3.372. See also Moth as the child Hercules who “did strangle serpents in his manus” (5.2.591).

66. Helkiah Crooke, Body of Man (1615), 282, cited in OED, s.v. “manner.”

67. See OED, s.vv. “manner,” “manure”; and Ellis, 157-58.

68. See Rubinstein.

69. See The Essayes of Michael Lord of Montaigne, trans. John Florio (1603; rpt. London: Dent, n.d.), 1.22, where Florio's preposterous translates as Montaigne's desnaturées; Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925-52), 3:376; The Honest Whore, Part 1, in The Chief Elizabethan Dramatists, Excluding Shakespeare, ed. William Alan Neilson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911-61), 2.1.441; Michaelmas Term, ed. Richard Levin (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1966), 3.1.17-18; Nashes Lenten Stuffe (London, 1599), in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958). See also Etienne Dolet, In praepostera venere utentes, in Carminum libri quatuor (Lyons, 1538), 2.32. The charge of sodomy circulated as a principal epithet of invective among rival humanists. See Leonard Barkan, Transuming Passion: Ganymede and the Erotics of Humanism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991), esp. 53-71. See also Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 88, on the “posterne door” of a manuscript compiled in the 1630s by Tobias Alston, which contains several satirical homoerotic poems. It is important to note that such sexual back-door references in the period occur in male-female as well as male-male contexts.

70. Ellis also sees in “arts-man, preambulate” and its proximity to “at your sweet pleasure” (5.1.85) something that sounds like an “invitation to sodomy” (119). He locates sodomitical references in terms in the play such as carriage and bearing (1.1.270-71). See also secrety (5.1.110) in the passage on the “posterior of the day.”

71. See Porter, 160-63.

72. In addition to Parker, “Preposterous Events,” see the discussions of sodomy and homoeroticism in the period in, inter alia, Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London: Gay Men's, 1982); Jonathan Goldberg, “Sodomy and Society: The Case of Christopher Marlowe, ” Southwest Review 4 (1984): 371-78; and Stephen Orgel, “Nobody's Perfect: Or Why Did the English Renaissance Stage Take Boys for Women?” in Displacing Homophobia: Gay Male Perspectives in Literature and Culture, ed. Ronald R. Butters et al. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1989), 7-30. Gregory W. Bredbeck, Sodomy and Interpretation (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991), in his reading of Troilus and Cressida, omits the historical resonances of “preposterous discoveries,” though the term links preposterous venery in the play to the larger problem of the construction of an order presented as natural. Goldberg, in his recently published Sodomitries (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1992), depends on the currency of the use of preposterous in this sense, but in his chapter on Shakespeare he curiously misses the signal use of the term in the play he analyzes (Henry V), though it is used there (2.2.112) in the scene that has precisely to do with what Goldberg treats as the betrayal of Henry's bedfellow Scroop. My own analysis of preposterous venery in Shakespeare, and in Love's Labor's Lost was first presented at the Shakespeare Association of America meetings in 1989.